Revisiting Arpeggios

The guitar fretboard is a formidable landscape, where each string acting essentially as its own piano. One of the most dizzying aspects of playing the guitar is the fact that any musical passage can be played a staggering number of ways. On a piano, if one wishes to play a Cmaj7 arpeggio starting from middle C, then there is only one unique way to play it. On the guitar, the ambiguity is two fold - not only can we find middle C in a variety of positions, but once we do choose a position, then there are a variety of shapes with which to play the arpeggio from that position!

In order to develop confidence in playing throughout the fretboard, we learn scales up and down the neck, we learn chord progressions up and down the neck, etc. In this exercise, we will look at 7th arpeggios as means for further developing our fretboard confidence and mastery.

Cmaj7	Dm7	G 7
Fmaj7	G7	Dm7
G7

Above we see 7 7th arpeggio shapes. Some have their root on the G string, one has its root on the B string and yet others hae their root on the E string. Learning arpeggio shapes in this way increases our arpeggio vocab and allows us to play a given arpeggio at a variety of positions. The result is that no matter where we are on the fretboard, we don't have to move far to play a certain arpeggio.

The above arpeggios are diatonic to C Maj. If we take a look at the 7th chords/arpeggios that arise in C Maj, we get Cmaj7, Dm7, Em7, Fmaj7, G7, Am7, Bm7b5. These chords are the I, II, II, IV, V, VI and VII chords, respectively. When you hear people talk about a II V I progression in C Maj, they are referring to the Dm7, G7 and Cmaj7 chords, respectively. Referring again to the above diagram, we see that the chords/arpeggios we are considering are the I (Cmaj7), II (Dm7), IV (Fmaj7) and V (G7). We are extending the II V I idea by adding the IV. But since the IV can substitute for the II (because of note similarity), then what we have is still essntially a II V I sound.

There are an unlimited number of ways we can sequence these arpeggios to form a musical passage. We could simply keep repeating a II V I progression or we can mix things up a bit. We will of course mix things up!

Audio

MIDI

As with many of my lessons, I prefer to reinforce several skills at the same time. It makes good use of your time and mine alike! In the case of the above exercise, we are reinforcing our arpeggio knowledge, we are strengtheing our ability to play throughout the fretboard (in key!) and lastly, we are refining our alternate picking chops yet again. Guitarists would normally play the above with sweep picking, but I find that playing such patterns with alternate picking does absolute wonders for alternate picking chops due to the intricacy of the picking patterns.

Enjoy!

Brian Huether