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Most guitarists don’t need more information. They need what they already know organised so they can find it while they’re playing. That’s the difference between knowing four scale patterns and having a fretboard.
So this page is sorted by what’s actually in the way, rather than by topic. Find the sentence that sounds most like you.
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01
“I know the shapes, but I never leave the one I started in.”
Breaking the Box
The problem was never the shapes. Nobody showed you the joins. This is a three-step method for connecting the positions you already know, so you move along the neck instead of up and down inside one pattern.
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02
“Everything I play sounds like an exercise.”
Melodic Soloing in 10 Days
Running a scale isn’t the same as playing a melody, and the fix isn’t more scales. Ten days of thinking melody-first instead of pattern-first, built on one class at music college that changed how I play.
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03
“I play the same scale over all twelve bars.”
Blues Soloing Maps — Playing the Changes
Minor pentatonic over everything is why your blues sounds identical in bar one and bar nine. These are the shortest books I’ve written, and they do one thing: show you what to aim at as each chord goes past.
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04
“I know one position properly and guess at the rest.”
The 2 Position Scale System
Five positions is three more than most players ever genuinely use. Two patterns, properly known, cover the whole neck for scales and arpeggios — and the second one takes an afternoon.
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05
“I’ve learned the modes three times and they still don’t stick.”
Quickstart Guides: Modes
They don’t stick because they’re taught as seven scale patterns, when they’re one scale looked at from seven angles. What makes a mode sound like itself is the chord underneath it, not the fingering — which is why the patterns evaporate the moment you stop drilling them. This gets you into any mode in any key without adding a single new shape.
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06
“Theory is a pile of separate facts I can’t use.”
Hacking the CAGED System: Diatonic Harmony
Knowing a key has seven chords doesn’t help if you can’t find them under your hands. This builds every component of any key signature on the fretboard as one connected thing, rather than a list to memorise and then lose.
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07
“My chords are grips I memorised years ago.”
Chords from the Top
Chords filed by the note on top rather than the root, because the top note is the one the listener actually tracks. It changes what you reach for, not how many shapes you own.
If more than one of those was true
Then start with the foundation, because most of the above are symptoms of the same thing. Hacking the CAGED System Book 1 cuts CAGED down to four workable patterns and builds everything else out of them.
It’s taught in F major rather than one of the two or three keys guitarists get comfortable in. That’s deliberate, and it’s the part that makes it stick: a system learned in a comfortable key only ever works in comfortable keys.
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