Tenor Guitar Method in GDAE Tuning: The CAGED Approach to Practice and Melody-Chord Arranging

Todd Montgomery’s Tenor Guitar Method presents a systematic introduction to the essential chord shapes and their related arpeggios in GDAE tuning. Using the CAGED chord approach, 5 inversions of the principal major, minor, and dominant 7th chord types are shown. The author examines how these chords relate to each other in keys and encourages muscle memory of the 3 or 4 essential chord tones of each chord inversion. The author’s goals are: 1.) to improve dexterity by teaching you to create chord/melody arrangements based on chord tones, and 2.) to help you emphasize the melody with more harmonic confidence while using the entire fretboard of the tenor guitar. As the GDAE, perfect-5th tuning used in this book lies an octave below mandolin or violin tuning, those who already play these instruments will gain new insights to them and easily add the entirely new voice of the tenor guitar to their instrumental arsenals. Illustrated with photos of tenor guitars in various acoustic and electric formats, fretboard grids are provided for each chord shape and scale pattern. The book’s 68 progressively arranged exercises are shown in both standard notation and tablature; online recordings of every selection complete the package. Read more