About Triads & CAGED Trainer
Triads & CAGED Trainer is a free, independent practice tool for guitarists. It exists because the gap between understanding triads and finding them on the neck under time pressure is a practice problem, not a reading problem — and almost every resource out there solves the reading half.
What This Site Is
Three things, built to be used together: an interactive drill app that tests recognition and recall, reference charts with free printable PDFs, and written guides covering the theory. Everything is free, with no account, no subscription, no ads and no email capture.
Where the Shapes Come From
Every voicing on this site — on the fretboard diagrams, in the charts, in the PDFs and in the drills — is generated by the same music-theory engine rather than drawn by hand. The engine works from interval formulas: it builds each triad from its root, third and fifth, respells the notes correctly for the key (so you get A♭–C–E♭, not G♯–C–D♯), then finds every close-voiced position for it on each three-string set in standard tuning.
This matters for one practical reason: hand-drawn chord charts drift. A diagram gets copied, a fret number gets transposed wrong, and the error propagates. Because every shape here is derived rather than transcribed, the chart for F♯ diminished is produced by the same code path as the chart for C major, and both are covered by the same tests.
It also means the charts and the trainer can never disagree with each other. When the app asks you to find an A♭ minor triad on strings 2·3·4, it is checking your answer against the same data the printable chart was rendered from.
What It Covers
- All four triad qualities: major, minor, diminished and augmented.
- All 12 keys, spelled correctly for each quality.
- All four three-string sets: 1·2·3, 2·3·4, 3·4·5 and 4·5·6.
- Root position, first inversion and second inversion.
- All five CAGED shapes, and which triads sit inside each one.
- 39 printable chart PDFs — triads, CAGED and CAGED triads, per key and all-keys.
Standard tuning (E–A–D–G–B–E) throughout, with shapes shown within the first 12 frets.
Why It's Free
This is a side project, not a business. There is no funding to recover and no upsell behind the drills, so there is no reason to gate anything. If it saves you time there is an optional tip link in the header — that is the entire monetisation.
The trade-off is that development happens when there is time for it. Features land irregularly, and the roadmap is driven by what people ask for rather than by a schedule.
Privacy
No accounts, so there is nothing to collect. Settings live in your own browser's local storage. Anonymous product analytics record which features get used so development effort goes to the right places — the full detail is in the privacy policy.
Corrections and Requests
If a shape looks wrong, it is worth reporting — a generated chart can still be generated from a wrong assumption, and that is the kind of bug that is invisible until a player spots it. Feature requests and bug reports both go through the contact link inside the app's help dialog.