Hi! How you doing? Justin here.
In this lesson today, I'm going to do
a beginner's guide to arpeggios.
I've seen a lot of people pretty confused
about what arpeggios are.
How to use them, and how to
get started using them.
So, I want to explain a bit
of the basics in this lesson today.
So the first thing is what is an arpeggio?
I tend to think of an arpeggio as a liquid chord.
Or you could think of a chord
as a frozen arpeggio, I guess.
And if we put that into practice right away
a good way of understanding it is to think
of an open G chord.
If you play a regular open G
. . .
The notes that you are playing
G
B
D
G
B
and G again.
. . .
And if we play those notes
one at a time we are playing an arpeggio.
. . .
G
B
D
G
B
D
G
. . .
Now to get a little thing out of the way here
some people find it a little confusing
this commonly used term in guitar language
arpeggiating, or arpegiated.
What this commonly means is
when somebody holds down a chord
and picks notes out from the chord.
So
. . .
That kind of thing, is kind of
referred to as arpegiated or arpegiating a chord.
It is kind of I guess playing an arpegio,
because you are playing one note
at a time from the chord.
But it's not playing an arpeggio
in the real sense that we're
talking about using them now.
What I'm talking about is more of a
kind of a lead guitar thing
than a rhythm guitar thing.
So, don't let that term confuse you.
What we're talking about is arpeggios,
ie; lead guitar and that would be,
arpeggiating or arpeggiated.
Which is kind of a rhythm guitar technique.
So, scales versus arpeggios,
a lot of people a bit confused about
what the difference is between
the scale and an arpeggio.
With a scale, you tend to learn one scale
that's played over a group of chords in a key.
You can think of it like in a blues,
you've got, say a blues in G
has the chords, G, C7, and D7,
or G7, C7 and D7.
And you would often play over that
a G minor pentatonic scale,
over the whole thing.
That's kind of playing in a key,
you're learning a scale to play in a key.
This also works, of course, with the major scale.
The chords in the key of G
would be G major, A minor, B minor,
C major, D major, E minor,
F sharp half diminished, or F sharp minor 7 flat 5,
which a chord no one uses,
so don't worry about it, and G.
A good song example is Wish You Were Here,
and Wonderful Tonight.
There's lots of songs in the key of G.
If you were soloing you might play
the G major scale over the whole thing.
You wouldn't have to be thinking about
the chords too much, you just tend
to think about the scale.
And that fits over all of the chords.
But there comes a point where that's not enough anymore,
where it's not right just to play the scale
over a whole bunch of chords.
Because really you want to be a little more
specific than that.
I often think of it like if you're playing in a band,
if the soloist is thinking of a scale instead of the chords,
he's kind of talking without listening
to what the rest of the band is talking about.
So the band can be doing whatever they like,
and he's just away in his little scale world,
where when you start thinking of chords,
you're playing with the band.
Because the band all are saying, G7,
and you're saying, G7. You're saying the same thing.
That kind of makes it stronger.
One thing that you'll find with arpeggios
the more that you study them is, they're used all the time.
Nearly all the great guitar players are using arpeggios.
Maybe not as much as they practice their arpeggios,
and they're using them, but they're using
the strong chord tones, the notes that come from the chords.
Even a lot of the old Blues guys, who I'm really certain
never studied their arpeggios, like BB King, or Albert King,
They tend to use the strong notes from
the chords, the arpeggio notes.
They kind of selected the notes from the minor pentatonic scale
that worked best with that chord.
So they're in affect using arpeggios too.
So the big difference between scales and arpeggios
is that with arpeggios you think of an individual chord.
If we were playing a blues in the key of A,
you wouldn't any longer be thinking of say the A minor pentatonic scale
over the whole A Blues progression.
You'd be thinking of A7 arpeggio, when there's an A7 chord.
And when the chord changes to D7,
you'd be playing a D7 arpeggio.
This sounds really cool, it's pretty complicated.
And I still remember the first time I tried
to do this sitting on the floor
in my lounge room back in Tazmania,
with my mate Andy.
We were trying to play a Miles Davis
song called Freddy Freeloader.
And neither of us could believe the idea that we
had to change arpeggios each time the chord changed.
It just seemed impossible, but after maybe
a few weeks, or it might have been
a couple months thinking about it,
we managed to get it together and we could
play through that song.
It was just the Blues, but it's a bit tricky
when you're used to playing a scale all of the way through,
and then suddenly you have to think of
you're listening to the band to find when
the chord changes, and when the chord changes,
you have to remember what the chord is,
and then play suitable notes from the arpeggios.
All that makes it sound a little bit more
complicated than it really is, to tell the truth.
Because after you've learned them you tend
to forget about them and just let
your fingers and your ears do the walking.
It's not really an intellectual exercise,
but at the beginning it is.
When you first learn these arpeggios and
you start to use them, you will find it pretty complicated.
Now there's another really good reason
to learn arpeggios and that is when
you're playing in a key very often you'll find
one chord, that doesn't fit with the whole key.
And a lot of people get a bit bummed out
with that, they don't know what they're going to play.
We were talking about Wish You Were Here and stuff before.
All of those chords are in the same key, so you can just
play that one scale over the whole song, and it sounds great.
You also find very often a chord that
will just sneak in, that's not in the key.
A really common one would be in the key of G.
You have a chord sequence that goes
G
to C
to B7
to Em
Now the chords G, C and Em are all found
in the key of G, so they're no problem.
But when it comes to that B7
. . .
particularly it's got one note here, a D sharp.
That D sharp, that would sound really funny
if you played a D or an E over the top or it.
ie; you just stick to your G Major scale.
So at that point you would change.
You'd be playing a G Major scale.
. . .
Still G Major.
. . .
B7
. . .
Em
. . .
At that point, just where it goes to the B7.
. . .
You'd have to run up your B7 arpeggio.
So it's a very useful thing to be able to learn your arpeggio shapes.
So that when you come across a chord
that's not diatonic, i.e. it's not in the key,
that you know how to handle it,
that you can keep playing through that.
A lot of people just think of the shapes
on the guitar to be honest and just
pick one or two of the notes directly
from the chord shape that they might play.
Which works, it's kind of the same
as using an arpeggio, but you're
better off using your arpeggio shapes.
Now as well as that, you could use the arpeggios
even when it doesn't change key, if you like.
Because then it just sounds again stronger
the way I explained with the blues.
If you had a chord progression that went
G, D, C, G again, you could play, of course,
G Major scale all over that.
But if I played the arpeggio notes,
I'm just going to give a funny example
moving up and down the neck so you can hear.
But you'll hear the chord changes in there
even though I'm only playing single lines now.
So if I went
. . .
You can hear quite clearly the chord changes.
I deliberately moved around the neck so you
could see where the changes were.
That's a really strong way of playing,
playing out of the chords.
Mark Knopfler is a fantastic example
of a guy that plays out of the chords all the time.
If you transcribe any of his songs,
or if you learn any of his songs then
you know what the chords are underneath the solo,
and you compare what notes he's playing in the solo
with the chord his playing over.
It's very, very chord based.
Which is fantastic, and it's one of the things
that makes his guitar playing sound so great.
Not saying that you have to, but most of the guys
that are good do use this technique.
So, where do you start?
Because there's a whole lot of different arpeggios, if you go
on my site, you'll find there's five different
arpeggios shapes for four different chord types.
So, that's a lot of stuff.
What is it you should start with?
What I would really recommend is that you start
with a dominant 7th arpeggios.
One, because you can use them in the blues,
and it's a nice easy way to kind of get
the idea of using arpeggio playing.
Also, often when there's one chord in a diatonic
sequence, like all the chords are in the same key
except for one chord.
That one chord that's not in key is
very often a dominant 7th chord for
a reason I don't want to go into now.
--secondary dominants for you guys that
use or understand your music theory--
there's another good reason to start off with
the dominant arpeggios
What you would want to start off with is
learning the one based around the E shape.
Which is either the root on the 6th string,
in the key of A, which would sound like this.
. . .
That would be the first one to learn.
And then go about trying to play a blues,
just using that dominant 7th, and move it literally
from the 5th fret
where the A is up to the D at the 10th fret.
. . .
Try and play the 12 bar blues, all the way through,
moving from A
D
A
D
A
E
D
A
E
And back to an A at the end.
But that idea is you just use that one
arpeggio shape, and you use it for
a whole blues, practice using that one shape.
When you feel like you're confident with that,
maybe learn the D7 shape.
. . .
Always starting and ending on the root note, of course.
Which is kind of based around the A shape.
. . .
When I'm talking E shape and A shape I'm
referring to the caged system.
If you're not familiar with that you can
go and check out the caged system.
There's plenty of information on the web site about that.
And then maybe what you want to try doing is
changing between A7 and D7.
So if you had one bar of A7
one bar of D7
So you have A7
D7
A
D
A
D
A
D
A
And just try moving between one arpeggio
shape, and the other.
I've got a whole series actually about this
very movement, and playing using arpeggios.
It's called Jazz Up Your Blues, because this
using arpeggios is very often the first
step into Jazz for a lot of people.
Getting into Blues from Jazz you want
to learn your arpeggios.
In Jazz, you use arpeggios all the time.
You don't use scales in the traditional sense.
You can, of course, but most of the time
you are thinking of chords individually,
because the keys are changing so rapidly,
that it doesn't tend to make sense.
For most songs, most of the time, of course
not all of the songs, before some people
have a go at me and say,
"Yeah, so what, it's only got one key."
One chord, one key, actually two chords, two keys.
Now I'm getting pedantic on myself, anyway...
I would recommend that you get into
learning E shape and A shape dominant 7th chords
to start off with.
Get handy with them and learn to use
those over a blues.
The next step would be to learn E shape
and A shape, so two arpeggio shapes
for each chord, Major 7, minor 7, dominant 7,
which you should have learned already by now,
and minor 7 flat 5.
Now minor 7 flat 5 might seem a little
bit of an odd one to learn, because
I've already said once earlier in this video,
that not many people use that chord shape.
But it comes into it's own a little later on,
when you start to super impose it over
other chords, which I know sounds really
complicated, but it is something you might get into,
and it is worth learning that arpeggio shape,
while you're at it.
Even if it's for the sake of being a completist,
learn two of each of the major 7th, minor 7,
dominant 7, and minor 7th flat 5.
If you've got that down, you'll find that
really a great stepping point into playing jazz,
You'll be able to handle almost any chord you come to,
and that's how you kind of use arpeggios.
Hopefully that makes sense.
There's some more information about
using arpeggios on the web site, of course.
And if you go and find this lesson on the web site,
there'll be a link to a forum, where if you've
got any questions about this rambling long lesson,
I've done, where there's lots of talking,
and it's probably a little bit confusing.
I'll try and answer as many of your questions,
on the forum that I can.
I hope that makes sense to some or all of you.
And I hope it's inspired some of you to get
into your arpeggio playing.
Have fun. Take care.
Bye, bye.