The Quickest Way To Master All Major Modes
These final modal exercises will change the way you play the guitar forever.
By taking you through every mode, starting with the Major Pentatonic, you teach your hands how music works on the fretboard, it’s all about the intervals!
Music will soon come through you, not just from you.
The routine to master the major modes moves like this:
- Maj Pent – add #4 -Maj Pent – add maj7 – Maj Pent – Lydian
- Maj Pent – add 4 – Maj Pent – add maj7 – Maj Pent – Ionian
- Maj Pent – add 4 – Maj Pent – add b7 – Maj Pent – Mixolydian
Once this is completed, in all five CAGED shapes, move through the remaining eleven keys.
When you can do this, stop practising the major modes, and start practising the minor modes!
Master Major Modes Guitar Lesson | Related Pages
Major Scales | Step-by-step guitar course
Using the CAGED system and Major Pentatonic as our foundation, we can build all our major scales on the guitar.
The self-eliminating practice routine takes care of this in 8 steps. All you have to do is put the time in.
Advanced Acoustic Course
In the Advanced Acoustic Course, we find huge chord extensions and unique chords using open strings. A few solos are incorporated as well.
Perhaps most importantly, we create 2nd guitar parts for most of these tunes, enabling you to play along with me and the singers as if we were a band.
Major Pentatonic | Major Scales
This is where it all starts, you must learn how to play the Major Pentatonic in all five shapes and don’t cheat by thinking of them as minor.
And let’s not name these shapes 1-5, let’s call them by their CAGED name, and let’s practice them not just in A as the videos show!
Dom7 | Arpeggios
In step 3, we practice the dom7 arpeggios in all CAGED shapes. This is easy if you have completed the previous step, the maj7 arpeggios.
Video lessons are available starting on an A. To complete this step, you must play starting on the remaining 11 notes as well.
Maj7 | Arpeggios
Let’s practice the maj7 arpeggios in all CAGED shapes. This is relatively easy as long as you know your CAGED maj7 chord shapes.
Video lessons are available starting on an A. To complete this step, you must play starting on the remaining 11 notes as well.
Guitar Chords | The CAGED System
With traditional music theory, the stave, and a piano, you’ll get easy-to-understand chords but they will not help if you want to play chords on the guitar.
Instead, on the guitar we use chord shapes derived from the five open-position chords, C, A, G, E, and D, hence CAGED.
Chordacus
Spytunes chords, scale, and arpeggio software, Chordacus is a refined version of the so-called CAGED system.
Now available as both a chromatic (original version) and “within a key”, developed with the help of a Spytunes student.
About me | Dan Lundholm
This was a guitar lesson about a major modes master exercise, by Dan Lundholm. Discover more about him and learn guitar with Spytunes.
Most importantly, find out why you should learn guitar through playing tunes, not practising scales, and studying theory in isolation.