One guy's take on learning scales: What do you think of #5?

[Pine Apple Slim]

To me caged is just the framework of chord shapes that becomes evident to anyone upon use of the capo, if you are paying attention.
Never really used the concept to learn scales. I had the concept long before I ever heard of caged. For me caged was all about finding the home base chord tones. I use my knowledge of scale construction to fill in the holes.

 

[LittleSnakes]

At the end of the day the best thing to do is to just transcribe a bunch of songs in the style you want to play if you are already a competent player...

Truth. More proof that the best way is seldom the easiest way. . . .

 

[LittleSnakes]

I hear this problem a lot with jazz beginners playing the pentatonic minor or minor blues scale over the tonic chord of a major blues. Maybe that's traditional (I haven't really studied traditional blues much) but is generally frowned upon by jazzers.

I want to amend this post. I've been studying a more diverse range of jazz blues tunes lately to learn a bunch of classic heads and a fair number of them rely on the minor pentatonic entirely. I've found when improvising over many of them that it detracts from the flavor to treat the major third as a chord tone (e.g. playing it on the downbeat or lingering on it as more than a passing note) so I think my earlier hard line was ill informed, at least w regard to the many classic heads that imply minor pentatonic.

 

[Modern Saint]

I view CAGED as a nice way of organizing music theory and concepts on a guitar. Prior to CAGED it was called forms and sadly, not every one referred to the 5 forms uniformly. With CAGED, there is no misinterpretation as it outlines the basic chord formations across the fretboard from 0-11th fret. If used properly - and I term this personally for myself - I can view the fretboard as a whole vs. small clusters. When I first began, all of the concentration was in small isolated areas ie: Position 1, Position 2, etc. While great for understanding one concept, it doesn't create an overall view of the fretboard. Plus with reading of music, it really just focuses down to a restricted area.

As for its use with scales, same thing. You can view things in blocks or the linear vs block methodologies. I prefer to link scales tonally but one who is just beginning to explore scales will still need to learn the vocabulary just like any other concept. The bottom line is that all of it are just tools to help us understand the instrument. And everyone has their own madness to conceptualize the instrument with how they view. Some concepts work for some while some concepts work for others.