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Hi @rdeputy : I remember not long ago being in a similar place as you describe. I was so deep in the forest I could not see the trees. The chord shape IS the basic building block of the pentatonic scale which becomes the building block for the octave scale. All of these are built on a single root tone. This is the time I started to idendify the individual names of the the three notes in the chord and figuring out how they relate to each other in order. After the academic exercise of thinking it through on paper take the time to feel it and hear it on the guitar as you play. The more this is practiced the less need there is for writing it out. My experience was they were interconnected: I could not do one without the other but as I felt and heard, paired with the understanding….CLARITY abounded. Chord degrees (triads)…that may be your next frontier?! If you have that down, we can figure out where your focus will yield the best progress.