Why

You may be asking yourself why have I gone to the trouble of making all this stuff about Chords and how to learn to play stringed instruments ? It is seemingly at odds with traditional methods (although someone has pointed out its similar in some ways to the CAGED system for Guitar).

My frustration at the seeming complexity of stringed instruments is at odds with their initial conception and design. It shouldn't be so hard to play them. For example, taking four basic chords (7th, dim7, Major, minor), there are 72 (4x12notes) basic chord tabs. That's 72 chord tabs to memorise. However these apply only to the frets at the top of the neck. To play all note positions down the neck, say in just one octave, you'd need to 'learn' 288 fingering positions.

There has to be a simple solution and, to my mind, there is. Actually you only need to know four fingering shapes for each chord and how to move from one note to another (only four relative finger movements down(up in tone) the neck). So these 20 pieces of information allow you to learn those same four chords in their entirety over the entire fretboard (neck) of the instrument. In fact four of those things to remember (the relative note movements on the neck) never change for an instrument tuning and can be applied to all chords.

As a side effect of this approach you can't help but learn a little theory but it comes from playing, not the other way round. I think, even if you know how to play already, that you'll find the approach mentally refreshing.

Another question I asked myself was - Why is the Ukulele tuning GCEA instead of something else ? (The base tuning of DGBE is the same arrangement of strings just 7 frets down, The Soprano tuning of ADF#B is just 2 frets down. So with my approach, learn to play one and you can play them all.).

On the other hand there are many tunings for the Guitar but EADGBE is the most popular. There must be a reason why, and of course there is. It is to make it easier to reach (fingerings) several kinds of common keys(chords). Some tunings are more popular for certain styles of music than the EADGBE tuning. So I decided to examine the spatial relationships between notes/strings/chords to look for patterns.

I initially could not find much mention of a similar approach but have since found two references. One is some old scanned pages of a 1937 series called the "Gibson system of Hawaiian guitar" which shows a chord harmony diagram and is clearly indicating spatial relationships between notes. The second is an almost exactly identical idea presented on a site for an Hawaiian holiday share. Possibly this spatial approach has been continuously taught in Hawaii but I have done no research on this.