Featured Lesson

Beginning Arpeggios

 In this lesson, we will introduce arpeggios. Their uses are quite vast, and you can apply them in everything from lead guitar to rhythm guitar, high speed solos to slow embellishments. Plenty of opportunities to be creative.

Using the 2 basic patterns to be described below, you are able to play major and minor arpeggios up and down the neck.
The theory behind these arpeggios in a nutshell works like this: 
Major Arpeggio built from the 1st, 3rd ,5th notes of the Major Scale. 
Minor Arpeggio built from the 1st, flattened 3rd, 5th of the Major Scale.

As you can see, this is exactly the same as constructing a chord using a chord formula. These arpeggios are basically just chords, but instead of strumming them, you are going to play the notes individually, as you would play a scale. Using your knowledge of chord formulas, you can now construct various other arpeggios and use them in your playing.

The techniques:

Left hand: The trick here is to release the note gently after playing it to deaden it before moving to the next note. If possible, use the tips of the fingers to mute the strings above the note being played, and use the fleshy pads of the fingers to mute the strings below the note. This takes a little bit of getting used to, but as you will see, when you use sweep picking, you need as much help with muting as you can get.

Right hand: Here you have 2 options. The easiest, but least economical is to alternate pick With practice, you can get the arpeggios up to a quick tempo. (Steve Morse alternate picks arpeggios extremely effectively) We won't go into much more detail with regard to alternate picking, as we have discussed this in a lot of depth on this site.
Then, you can sweep pick the arpeggio. Here you will use repeated downstrokes or upstrokes to pick the notes. The objective is to create a smooth, flowing SINGLE downward or upward movement across the strings with the pick. Try not to dig in too much with the pick. You don't want it to get snagged on the strings. You can use the wrist, elbow, or a combination of both to sweep the notes. Try also to use your right hand palm to mute the notes already played.

The Patterns:

Above is a Major arpeggio pattern in the key of C. The root note is the lowest note in the arpeggio, in this case C.
Using this information, you can move the pattern up and down the neck to other notes to create Major arpeggios for the chord of that root note.

This is a Minor arpeggio pattern, The lowest note again is the root note. In this case A, so we have an A Minor arpeggio. It is able to move along the neck in the same fashion as the Major arpeggio.

Practice these arpeggios both ascending and descending, and while you do this, try to visualize how the respective major and minor scale patterns fit over them. This will make application in your own playing a lot easier.

More arpeggio ideas next time.

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