Jimmy Bruno: 5 Fingerings: NOT scales or modes

[AllanAllen]

As somebody that’s never played a guitar, or any string instrument, this is a really difficult thing to wrap my head around.

I started mapping out all the different combinations that produce the same scale (in the same octave) for each major scale starting on the first scale degree, because it’s what I’m used to practicing other instruments

My teacher whipped out the Jimmy Bruno fingerings in response. It’s starting to make things clearer but man it’s weird hearing it like that. The fretboard is still mysterious to me

Keep at it, it’ll get better.

[pamosmusic]

For the record, I wasn’t arguing about the pedagogy of using the scale fingerings etc … just wasn’t sure why we hate calling it CAGED so much.

I use those fingerings. I start by teaching those fingerings. No objections there. Jimmy Bruno as a phenomenon is just interesting to me.

[Christian Miller]

You can call it what you like bruv but you have to know where the notes are innit


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[Tal_175]

It is interesting that in the scale fingering pedagogy discussions, the students' finger anatomy never comes up. Are some fingerings more suitable for double jointed students? How about students with small hands?

Obviously, hands and fingers are incredibly versatile organs and many limitations can be conquered overtime with practice. But I wonder if more optimal choices can be made if common anatomical variations are taken into account.

Double jointedness is an interesting case. There seems to be unique advantages and disadvantages to it with some potential long term injury risks. Is the choice of fingering (caged, three notes per string etc.) not a factor here?

[pamosmusic]

It is interesting that in the scale fingering pedagogy discussions, the students' finger anatomy never comes up. Are some fingerings more suitable for double jointed students? How about students with small hands?

Obviously, hands and fingers are incredibly versatile organs and many limitations can be conquered overtime with practice. But I wonder if more optimal choices can be made if common anatomical variations are taken into account.

Double jointedness is an interesting case. There seems to be unique advantages and disadvantages to it with some potential long term injury risks. Is the choice of fingering (caged, three notes per string etc.) not a factor here?

Ha!

Yeah I have a student with a double jointed pinkie and it keeps popping out of joint and flattening.

(cue Christian telling me to stop having that kid use his pinkie)

[AllanAllen]

It is interesting that in the scale fingering pedagogy discussions, the students' finger anatomy never comes up. Are some fingerings more suitable for double jointed students? How about students with small hands?

Obviously, hands and fingers are incredibly versatile organs and many limitations can be conquered overtime with practice. But I wonder if more optimal choices can be made if common anatomical variations are taken into account.

Double jointedness is an interesting case. There seems to be unique advantages and disadvantages to it with some potential long term injury risks. Is the choice of fingering (caged, three notes per string etc.) not a factor here?

Anatomy isn't a big deal for guitar. For every Pasquale with giant hands there's a dozen Jimmy Bruno's with regular hands and a few Danny Gatton's with stubby sausage fingers. What matters is sitting your butt down and practicing the guitar.

[pauln]

Anatomy isn't a big deal for guitar. For every Pasquale with giant hands there's a dozen Jimmy Bruno's with regular hands and a few Danny Gatton's with stubby sausage fingers. What matters is sitting your butt down and practicing the guitar.

Hear what a 9 year old Yuto Miyazawa's tiny fingers could do 15 years ago.
See how small he was compared to the lady that walks across at the end...

[Bobby Timmons]

I have the shakes that I can't control the more nervous I get.

[fep]

I went through a couple of his courses. I didn't have to learn any of his fingerings or running them through 12 keys. I already knew them because I already knew CAGED.

[pauln]

Maybe JB's beef with CAGED is the potential for conversion confusion (CAPO thinking). Refusing to call what looks just like CAGED as CAGED suggests a possible good reason concerning implications of using the wrong chord name for the form you are playing.

CAGED simply points out that the forms on the finger board for the cowboy chords are applicable translated up the neck (as other chords). The utility is that a particular finger in the fingering form of one of the CAGED chords always sounds the same relative chord tone, all over the neck,and this is generally universal. Conceptually, this is very powerful, freeing, and enlightening as long as you are thinking in chord tones as scale degrees in the abstract (scale degree numbers like 1, 3, 5, or names like tonic, mediant, dominant,) or in the particular (pitch class note names of the sounded tones like F, A, C).

However, if a CAGED form up the neck is thought of as "C in another place" (as if a CAPO were used) then the named primal particulars of the first position C chord may be difficult to suppress so as to think, see, feel, and hear the actual different thing fingered up the neck as its true pitch class structure.

Once the concept of CAGED is understood, the worst thing is to keep thinking of the wrong names of the chords, their tones, underlying scales, and other relationships. Maybe the way to teach CAGED would be to do it away from the instrument, teach that the forms are the same, maybe not even name the forms after the cowboy chords, and strive to never let the student call, name, or think of the forms by their founding first position chord names.

A lot of people already assume the major scale as a foundation upon which they make adjustments to produce what they want to play (so thinking or hearing something that is not what they intend to play in order to think or hear what they do want to play). Making the intended output twice removed by additionally converting the native cowboy chord note names of the form name to those of the actual fingering in use to the correct pitch class names would seem to just add more grinding in the gears.

CAGED only names five major chords, so in fairness it does seem to be a purely conceptual scheme for fingering (with just these examples for proof of concept), but as soon as you get it, you may extend it freely, generally, and abstractly, without ever thinking of the forms' names as the cowboy chord names.

[Tal_175]

To me CAGED is a positional (ie vertical) arrangement based on octaves within the span of maximum 3 frets, not cowboy major chords. These group of chords is just one manifestation of the utility of the octave based fretboard reference. It just so happens to be the manifestation most guitar players are familiar with.

[AllanAllen]

We've covered this over and over... He doesn't call it CAGED because he made up the system himself. It used to be 6 fingerings with odd names(5V2, 6V2, 6H1, and so on), then he simplified it to 5. So it's not CAGED, it's just like CAGED.

At the end of the day, it's a simple answer and best not to get hung up on. Though I'm starting to see why he's stuck teaching the same fingerings for years on YouTube.

[pamosmusic]

At the end of the day, it's a simple answer and best not to get hung up on.

to be fair, this was my point

[fep]

For me CAGED didn't start with scales it started with chords, scales came later. This was from private lessons I had in the 1970s with Bill Thrasher and, by the way, he dated his CAGED lesson pages as 1963.

He liked me to know the chord tones, how to spell chords, and how to adjust the chord tones/fingerings to derive chord fingerings for myself. E.g., "For this C chord fingering, how would you change it to make it a C dominant 9 chord"?

The whole CAGED lessons, which he gave piece meal between learning songs, was maybe in the neighborhood of 30 pages long. It was the foundation of my learning all the notes on the guitar. All his handouts, and I have maybe 300 pages of them, were handwritten.

[Lionelsax]

Hi !

I had never heard about CAGED system before knowing this forum but I discovered it mostly on my own without naming it by transposing what I knew with open strings (it's not the best way to learn the notes because it's only transposition), if I had to name it I wouldn't name it.
Ironically I learnt more using a capo and thinking about the real notes than transposing positions my left hand and I knew.

[Mick-7]

For the record, I wasn’t arguing about the pedagogy of using the scale fingerings etc … just wasn’t sure why we hate calling it CAGED so much.

Everyone objects to being caged.

Jimmy Bruno as a phenomenon is just interesting to me.

Does he qualify as a phenomenon? What are the requirements?

Ironically I learnt more using a capo and thinking about the real notes than transposing positions my left hand and I knew.

Oh my, don't mention capos here, that's even worse than uttering CAGED!

[GuyBoden]

At the start of this video Jimmy Bruno explains why his original Six Fingerings and his newer Five Fingerings method are in fact very similar.

[Christian Miller]

Ha!

Yeah I have a student with a double jointed pinkie and it keeps popping out of joint and flattening.

(cue Christian telling me to stop having that kid use his pinkie)

I teach classical technique to kids

Not sure what to do in that situation

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[MarkRhodes]

For me CAGED didn't start with scales it started with chords, scales came later. This was from private lessons I had in the 1970s with Bill Thrasher and, by the way, he dated his CAGED lesson pages as 1963.

He liked me to know the chord tones, how to spell chords, and how to adjust the chord tones/fingerings to derive chord fingerings for myself. E.g., "For this C chord fingering, how would you change it to make it a C dominant 9 chord"?

The whole CAGED lessons, which he gave piece meal between learning songs, was maybe in the neighborhood of 30 pages long. It was the foundation of my learning all the notes on the guitar. All his handouts, and I have maybe 300 pages of them, were handwritten.

A treasure trove, no doubt.
For those who don't recognize the name Bill Thrasher (or may be wondering, "Where have I heard that name before?"), he is the co-author of the book "Joe Pass Guitar Style." (The original publisher of that book was Carol Kaye. Years later---or conversely, not too long ago now---Carol made a CD in which she plays many of the examples from the book.)

[MarkRhodes]

At the start of this video Jimmy Bruno explains why his original Six Fingerings and his newer Five Fingerings method are in fact very similar.

Thanks for posting that. I hadn't seen it.
If you know both sets of fingerings, the overlap is obvious. (The "six" are more horizontal; the "five" are positional.)