Hey Friend,
Friday is upon us again! Hope you have some cool plans this weekend like my buddy Amanda - she's doing a live gig sitting in with a friend's band. Rockin' out!
As promised, I put together the basic exercises for open D major. You can get them here.
I organized them by what type of inversion they happen to be. The first four are root inversions.
A root inversion has the root note of the key/scale as its bass note in the chord. With D major, the root note is D, so that is the lowest pitched note in the chord.
A root inversion's notes are in order of the scale (that the chord is built from), so with D major in a root inversion, the note order is D, F# and A (1 3 5).
You may also notice that two root inversion chords get their shapes from the CAGED system. The first D major triad is the C shape moved up two frets. The third is the G shape moved up to the tenth fret.
There are three first inversion chords represented for D major. The note order for a first inversion is 3 5 1, and you'll see in the chord charts that that is indicated by the "/F#". This means the F# is the lowest pitched note in the chord. None of these shapes are represented in CAGED.
The final three triads are second inversion chords. Their note order is 5 1 3, putting the highest pitched note A as the bass in the chord. As a side note, if you think about that for a second, what we're actually doing is starting with the fifth note of a scale and building the chord into the next octave of that scale. Just interesting to me...
For each of these chords we have the A note as the bass. The three remaining CAGED shapes - E, D and A - are represented here. The E shape is slid up to the twelfth fret, the A shape is at the seventh fret and D is right where it belongs - in the open D position where we started.
Some of these shapes and positions will be easy. Others will give you a little challenge, either because of their awkward shape or their location Don't worry, you don't have to know them all at once. But the more you learn, the easier it will be to play any chord you need.
Think about it - any one of these shapes can be moved up or down to get another major chord. Slide any one of these up two frets and you have E major. Slide it down two frets and you have C major. All you have to know is the interval between the chord you're playing and the one you want to get to.
How do you figure out the interval? Use the pattern W W H W W W H! Works for every major chord.
And that's it... I'm outta time! See you on the next round. Have a great day!
Peace~
Dave | 
