Hey Friend,

I didn't get to building the D major chord exercises yet. My wife's new computer was having a fit and I ended up needing to exchange it. It's not very often you get a hardware glitch, but it happens. Mac or PC, doesn't seem to matter... 

Let's move on down the road here. D major in the open form is one of those movable shapes from the CAGED system. If you recall, CAGED gives us the five basic chord shapes that allow us to simply move the shape up or down the strings to play any major chord.

For example, move the D shape up two frets and you have an E major chord voicing. Move it down two frets and you get C major. While I didn't mention it before, the G major chord is also one of these movable chord shapes.

Each letter of CAGED represents the open form of the chord. C is C major, A is A major and so on. The idea is that regardless of where you're playing on the neck, you are working within a block of frets which you can play all the chords you need.

So with D major, if you apply the CAGED system, you can take the C major triad shape, slide it up two frets, and you are now playing D major. 

Remember the C major root 5 barre chord (or any root 5 barre chord, for that matter)? The triad is an A major triad shape, just moved up to the fifth fret with a barre added at the third fret. If you move that up again two frets, you have D major.

The point is, you already know a lot more about playing chords all around the guitar neck just by knowing the five basic shapes of the CAGED system. With these five shapes, you can play D major in five different locations. 

I'll get into some more detail tomorrow along with nearly a dozen different positions for D major tomorrow. And exercises. Right now, gotta run for the j.o.b.

Peace~

Dave