Minor 9 Arpeggio Guitar

[Dannie Heinzen]

Arpeggioson guitar are when the notes of a chord are played individually one after the other. Arpeggios provide a framework for targeting chord tones and can be used to add a bit of color to guitar solos and fills. They are also quite popular in metal and neoclassical styles of music when played with a sweeping technique.

From this chord shape, we can build a major arpeggio. Since arpeggios are played one note at a time, we can complete this arpeggio by grabbing the major 3rd on the 5th string and adding it to the barre chord.

The diagrams below give you the CAGED major arpeggio shapes, the chord shapes from which they are derived, and the suggested fingering for playing each shape. Use the fingerings as a guide and feel free to adjust as necessary.

When playing through the guitar arpeggios, start with the lowest root note and play ascending and descending, finishing on the same root note in which you started. Each arpeggio includes a tab to follow.

The D shape arpeggio is built from the D form chord, but also includes three additional notes; the 3rd on the 6th string, 5th on the 5th string, and 3rd on the 3rd string. This shape is very awkward to play in its full form and frequently you see just the 5th, root, and 3rd played on strings 1-3.

In the tab/audio below, the whole scale is played first, followed by just the root, 3rd, and 5th of each scale. Listen to the examples to hear the difference the 3rd scale degree makes between major and minor.

The Am shape arpeggio begins with the same root note as the C shape, the root on the 5th string. However, instead of playing it with the pinky finger, you use your index finger. This moves your positioning down and creates the A shape instead of the C shape.

The root of the Em shape is shared with the root of the Gm shape. Similar to the Am & Cm shapes, the root of the Em is played with the index finger, shifting the position down the fretboard and creating a new arpeggio shape.

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In a previous lesson we took a brief look at lead guitar arpeggios. Arpeggios are very effective in lead guitar lines as they break up scale-based passages and add interest and variety to solos. This lesson will focus on minor arpeggios.

Arpeggios can be used in lead guitar solos in any kind of music. Rock and metal guitarists use arpeggios all the time, as do jazz guitarists. Even a blues guitar solo can be spiced up with some arpeggio licks. Example arpeggio-based blues licks are provided further down the page.

The following diagrams show movable minor arpeggio shapes. The root notes for each shape are shown as a blue circle. This means (for example) that if you position the blue notes in the diagram over G notes on the fretboard, the arpeggios produced will be G minor arpeggios.

Minor arpeggio shapes can be combined to create longer licks and lines. Below are two examples in notation and TAB. Picking directions have been included to show how sweep picking can be used to play arpeggios.

Sweep picking is a technique in which notes on two or more adjacent strings are played with one stroke of the pick. The pick is moved smoothly over the strings in one continuous movement. For example, the first four notes of Lick 1 below are all played with the same downward stroke.

When sweep picking, only the note being picked should be allowed to sound. The fretting fingers should be positioned ready to play the notes, but should only allow the string to ring when they are picked. If the notes are allowed to overlap, the effect will be lost and the line will just sound like a chord being strummed.

We hope that you found this lesson useful, and are experimenting with arpeggios in your own lead lines. Don't forget to subscribe to Guitar Command for regular guitar news and articles. As usual, let us know what you think of this lesson in the comments below.

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Arpeggios are used in all genres of music, such as jazz, blues, rock, metal, classical music, pop, etc. In jazz (and metal) arpeggios are used differently compared to other genres of music.

In pop music for example, an arpeggio on guitar is usually used for accompaniment. Instead of playing or strumming the notes of a chord simultaneously, the individual notes of the chord are played in succession by applying a fingerpicking pattern, usually on acoustic guitar.

The following charts in the list below are an overview of arpeggio positions for the most common chord types. The big diagram shows all the notes of the arpeggio over the entire neck, the smaller diagrams beneath it show the individual arpeggio grips.

G7b9 (V): here a diminished arpeggio (Bdim7) starting from the 3rd (b) of the dominant chord is played. There is a slight difference between the arpeggio shape played ascending and the shape played descending to make it easier to go to the next arpeggio shape.

Diminished chords (and arpeggios) are symmetrical because they are built by stacking minor thirds. This means that you can treat any note of a dim7 arpeggio as the root note: you could think of the Bdim7 arpeggio as either Bdim7, Ddim7, Fdim7 or Abdim7, they are all the same.

A very cool fingering is the shared root fingering: because any note in a dim7 arpeggio can be considered the root, if you take a Bdim7 and start from the second note in that arpeggio (D), you are now sharing a root note with the iim7b5 chord.

This means that you can now play iim7b5-iidim7 over the iim7b5-V7b9 section of the progression, allowing you to solo over those changes without changing the root note or moving your hand on the fretboard between chords.

To complete our arpeggio tutorial, we will learn how to use arpeggios in a song. To get you started applying arpeggios over chord changes, here is a solo over Autumn Leaves that uses arpeggios and concepts from this section.

Work the solo one phrase at a time until you can put everything together to form the solo as a whole. From there, you can play it along with the audio example, as well as solo over the backing track as you create your own arpeggio solos over this tune.

For the minor 7 arpeggios I have a bit of confusion with scale relation. Would that be based off the melodic or harmonic minor modes? Just need to wrap my head around scale relation. Thanks for the help:)

This reminds me of something I saw Eric Johnson talking about but with chord substitution. If I remember correctly he said one could eliminate the 3rd and play a triad of 1, 5, b7 and play it over either a Dominant 7th or a Minor 7th chord and it would fit. If you look at the last arpeggio on the 12th fret and play the 1, 5, b7, and the 9th on the 1st sting you have a 4 note arpeggio or chord you can play over the Dm7 for a different sound or just play the triad as a chord/arpeggio.

Hi Francis, CAGED refers to an approach to learning chords, scales, and arpeggios on the guitar based around the open chords C, A, G, E, and D, which are then moved up the fretboard to create moveable shapes on the neck. hope that helps.

The other approach I like to use is diatonic arpeggios rather than inversions. So if soloing over Cmaj7, I would use Cmaj7, Dm7, Em7, Fmaj7, G7, Am7, and Bm7b5 arpeggios to bring out different colors over that chord. And again, focusing on root-based shapes, just diatonic ones this time, in my lines.

In regards to this lesson, at what point works you say that one should work out the arpeggio shapes in inversion? Starting with the 3rd, the 5th, and the 7th off the chord? I was considering how to voiceless these arp shapes within the CAGED scale fingerings.

The diminished arpeggio example is an EXTREMELY EXCELLENT exercise. It helps to get the fingers to flow smoothly with out the mind getting involved / in the way. It is now part of my warm-up exercise.

Hey, there are a number of ways to finger these so you can try a few out and see what fits best. In the licks, I used the same fingerings that I used for the arps, so once you get an arp fingering you like you can keep it for the licks.

Now, if you know anything about chords, you will know that a minor triad is formed when you take a major triad and lower the 3rd one half step. So in essence, all of these arpeggios are going to be the same thing as the major ones we learned before, but we are going to alter one note to make it a minor arpeggio.

This little exercise is going to combine the 2nd inversion major and minor arpeggios going through the harmonized D major scale. Don't worry about getting this down fast, just make sure the notes are played cleanly and accurately. (note: there is an arpeggio at the end that we didn't go through but don't worry about that one for now.)

This arpeggio is especially tricky to play because of the bar on the 9th fret across the top 3 strings. In order to make the "rolling" technique on this one work, you'll need to fret the G string note with the tip of your finger, using the fleshy underside of the finger to fret the B and E string notes. To execute the first roll, pick the G string. Then, as you go to pick the B string, arch the first knuckle of your barring finger and roll the finger in the direction of the sweep so that the tip of the finger mutes the G string. As you pick the E string, continue rolling the finger to mute the B string. If this is done the right way, the notes will sound separate and distinct. When performing the descending (upstroke) sweeps, roll your barring finger in the opposite direction.

You are much better off learning a snippet of a scale and to use an idea you can implement immediately in your improvising and soloing. Having a small idea you can practically use for arpeggio integration is much more powerful than having a theoretical idea you cannot actually play.

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