B Minor Arpeggio Piano

[Marquez Feliciano]

Closerelated to the Minor Scales are these arpeggios, based on minor triads (three-note chords).

The patterns shown in the diagrams below can be played all over the keyboard and with both hands. The general fingerings are (right hand ascending): 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. To accomplished this the thumb goes under the hand to the next octave and the long finger is used as pivot finger.

A Minor arpeggio from root over two octaves and ending on the root on third octave:

For those who want to learn or revise all the minor arpeggios, all minor arpeggio diagrams and videos are complied here. The arpeggios here are not arranged by order of difficulty, but rather in a chronological order. If you would like to them according to the order of difficulty, please refer to the graded syllabus.

Learning your piano minor arpeggios will help you to confidently know all your minor chords. Minor chords are built using the 1st degree, the flatted 3rd degree and the 5th degree of the major scale. Learn more about how chords are built here.

To play a C major arpeggio, you use the same notes but play them one at a time going up or down. So going up you would play the C first, then the E, then the G and then the C on TOP of the G. And you could keep going.

Lisa Witthas been teaching piano for more than 20 years and in that time has helped hundreds of students learn to play the songs they love. Lisa received classical piano training through the Royal Conservatory of Music, but she has since embraced popular music and playing by ear in order to accompany herself and others. Learn more about Lisa.

Quite a few years back I wrote a post breaking down scale fingering. When it comes to scale fingering resources, we are typically treated to reams of details, on a note by note basis. The normal approach is to simply read these off and repeat by rote until the scales are fluent. Instead of working that way, my post was designed to show a small number of defining features based on relationships between hands. With understanding of merely two basic unifying relationships, all major and minor keys (excepting only B flat and E flat major) can be covered within a simple premise, that will easily allow you to find any smaller detail by association. This saves a huge amount of time, that can be wasted when swamped in the least relevant details. Although nothing can altogether replace rote practise, the process is more efficient when we have a clear and simple vision of the foundation which holds lesser details together- ie thumb locations (particularly those where both thumbs coincide).

In a sense, arpeggio fingering is so much more straightforward that it doesn't actually require a similar post. I'll give a brief summary. When an arpeggio begins from a white key you should start with the lowest available finger. That will be the thumb in the right hand and the 5th finger in the left hand (which leaves no spare fingers unused beneath the starter note, in either hand). However, this 5th finger is a one off substitute, on what would usually be the thumb's note. In following octaves, both thumbs land here as your chief reference (until the right hand uses 5 at the top- again as a substitute for the usual thumb). You then just need to decide on the other fingers. All major/minor arpeggios are built on a basic hand shape of 1235 or 1245. Your sole choice is between 3 or 4. Looking at the width of the spaces between notes should usually make it easy to tell which fits a chord shape best. However, if the arpeggio starts on a black key, you must look to see if there is a white key included in the chord. If there are none, you can still apply the original principle- as if the black keys are really white keys. When white keys are available, however, you will assign your thumbs here, rather than to the starting black key. You can build the basic hand shape around this primary thumb location- in the same manner as if the arpeggio had begun here.

I've skimmed over a couple of extra details and that may be a little too condensed to make sense to all, right away (especially if you haven't already learned a few arpeggios to reference back to this). You may first want to start from a fingering chart and relate the details there back to this logic. Nevertheless, once you start to recognise the mechanics of this deeper premise, you really won't need much more. However, this post also runs far beyond which fingers go on which keys. Although studying this should soon ensure that you would never need to check an arpeggio manual again, the main focus is on making logical groupings of arpeggios for practice purposes- based on physical similarity. When putting similar arpeggios alongside each other, you will quickly come to understand them on a far deeper level. In fact, if you're the kind of person who doesn't particularly enjoy scales and arpeggios (but grudgingly recognises that they have value) you might assume that this post isn't particularly for you. Actually, you're exactly the kind of person who needs this- so you can get the basics ingrained permanently, with as little fuss as possible and only a bare minimum of drilling. The groups I'm going to show are extremely logical, yet far from obvious. It wouldn't be easy to stumble upon this approach for yourself. While plenty of the background is common knowledge elsewhere, I'm not aware of any other source that offers these groupings. Feel free to skip to the end section for the lists, if you don't find anything new to you in the middle section.

In the key of C major, say, C is the lowest note in root position, with E as the lowest for first inversion, or G as the lowest for second inversion. In traditional approaches, as I said earlier, the standard fingering for any of these shapes starts from the thumb in the right hand and 5 in the left hand, as long as the lowest note is a white key. Seeing as every note of C major is a white key, we thus have three physically natural chord shapes to fit the hand directly upon. Our chord positions and hand positions are one and the same thing.

I show all of these at the start of the film above. Before practising the arpeggio in each shape, I first get my hand used to that shape by playing it as a four note chord. Then I go quickly up and down the notes of that chord, using plenty of side to side arm movement to keep everything free. Do this as the norm for every arpeggio you practise until you have such a good sense of the shape, that you can imagine it in full detail. There's no sense in even trying to play through a whole arpeggio, unless you can easily go up and down the basic chord shape within an octave. Once the hand feels fully "tuned in" to the shape, I execute the actual arpeggio by passing the thumb. Each of the three chord shapes has a new placement of the hand to match. Notice how the thumb always defines which shape we are aligned to. Rather than demonstrate super-slow, to save both your time and mine I only went moderately slow. However, you don't need to try to watch every small detail closely. I want you to put almost all of your attention on where the thumbs occur, and notice how this governs the shapes.

As an alternative, we could also take the way the hand was set to the root position shape and simply recycle that. Root position fingering (in terms of which finger was assigned to which key) can now be applied to the inversions of the chord. I show this next in the film. Although this might sometimes be an option, I'd have to stress that it can't truly replace what I showed before. Particularly when doing the first inversion arpeggio, it becomes awkward to turn around rapidly on 1 and 2 at the top. To prove this, I show a 1st inversion run right up the piano, similar to one that features in a Pletnev arrangement from the Tchaikovsky Nutcracker. I first match my hand to the first inversion shape and then try it with the hand set to a root position shape. It should be very clear how much more sweep is possible when you start and finish from a full open hand shape, by matching the hand position to the chord shape. I can survive it when I use root position fingering but the awkward reversal at the top stops it coming alive. It's physically more fiddly at both top and bottom, which causes greater caution and restraint. To truly master white key arpeggios, you absolutely need a fingering for each position.

Aside from the many arpeggios with only white keys, G flat major and E flat minor exist upon three black keys. Seeing as we have no choice but to place the thumbs on a black key, here we treat them no differently to if they were on white keys. With three available keys to put the thumb on, we again have three chord shapes to match with three hand shapes.

However, lets look now at E flat major (E flat, G, B flat). There are always three different positions available for a chord, as defined by the lowest note. However, according to the premise of traditional arpeggio fingering, we need to avoid taking the thumb on a black key- as long as there is a white key available. This is because the thumb is shorter than the fingers and it is generally more awkward to have to reach forward into the black keys, during thumb passing (I should point out that this rule is occasionally broken in advanced piano playing, although this lies outside of the standard foundations). In the following video, I start by including these "wrong" fingerings, just for illustration purposes.

Again, I start by getting the hand used to the shape of the chord. Notice that there's nothing awkward about merely being on any of the basic shapes. It's solely when going on to pass the thumb, that the thumb on a black key is seen to be a problem (I'm not bad at these, but you might notice my loss of legato on the 2nd inversion). Seeing as there is only one white key, we only have one superior option available. Regardless of which chord position we play the arpeggio in, our hand will be built around the thumb note G- in a first inversion shape. By the way, I show with my right hand, but the left hand will be building positions around the exact same notes. Our premise is universal, not specific to either hand. Unlike C major, it makes no difference as to which which note the arpeggio begins from. Instead of matching the hand position to the specific chord position that starts the arpeggio, we take the one physically natural shape (via the white key) and base everything upon it.

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