Arpeggio C Major

[Fermina Enge]

Arpeggios on 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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When playing over a major chord, major arpeggios will help to connect your solo to the backing music. I often refer to arpeggios as the "skeleton" of your solo, fleshed out by other movements and embellishments, such as scale phrases.

This means you don't have to know the individual notes of every arpeggio you play (e.g. C major is C, E, G). Instead, you can memorise a few patterns and simply move them to the appropriate root for the chord you're playing over.

In other words, spatial awareness of how one note relates to another, in any key and over any chord, is a more efficient use of your practice time than trying to memorise each individual note of every chord/arpeggio.

Some of the above patterns look challenging. And they are! But as demonstrated in the video, you can use a technique called rolling to negotiate those "two/three strings, same fret" sequential movements.

Here, we string together the patterns from above to create one large neck-wide pattern. Remember, the sequence of patterns remains exactly the same for any chord. The only difference is where we position the root of the patterns in relation to the chord we're playing over.

This is useful if you want to jump between positions freely and create smoother, seamless phrases up and down the neck. This will be especially useful when we come to combining arpeggios with scales further down the line.

As demonstrated in the video, you'll need to use slides in some situations, in order to correctly position yourself at the next fret. But this has a welcome side-effect of giving your movements more fluidity and feeling.

When you have the individual patterns memorised, continue to practice linking them together in different ways. Challenge yourself! You can use my blank fretboard diagrams to mark on your own sequences.

Later, we'll learn how to connect these arpeggio patterns with related scales. To have these three important tones covered (1, 3, 5), means you'll find it far easier to form melodic phrases across the neck.

For those who want to learn or revise all the major arpeggios, all major 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.

Close related to the Major scales are these arpeggios based on Major triads (three-note chords).

Arpeggios can be used for melody lines and solos. The pattern shown in the diagrams below can be played all over the keyboard. Arpeggios are similar to scales, but could be seen as more melodic and more colorful. The general fingering is (right hand ascending): 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. To accomplish this, the thumb should go under the hand to the next octave and use the long finger as pivot finger. Notice that arpeggios also can be based on seventh chords and other chords types, and that the order of notes can be varied.

The musical notation above is a C Major arpeggio from root over two octaves and ending on the root on the third octave above (see more note examples below in downloadable pdf):

All triads and seventh chords are built using a system of stacked thirds (tertian harmony). The Major Arpeggio is built from a Major 3rd and a Minor 3rd. To create a C Major triad we simply take a root note of C, build a major 3rd up to E and then build a minor 3rd from the E up to G. This gives us the notes C E G.

For the spelling drills of Major Arpeggios, first learn the natural root notes followed by the flat root notes. Sharp root notes are less common because of the double sharps involved. The spellings are listed below:

You can practice your new found spelling ability and fretboard knowledge by playing each major arpeggio on a single string using only one finger. Avoid looking for patterns, simply spell the arpeggio and locate the notes on the fretboard. C Major and D Major are shown below:

The Major 7 arpeggio (1 3 5 7) has many uses; it can be superimposed over harmonies in all kinds of ways and I use it a lot. If you flatten the fifth (1 3 b5 7) you get a new sound with different applications. Here I'll talk about some of the possibilities.

If you play through them you'll probably find they present some quite awkward technical challenges; I've therefore produced some tabbed-out fingerings with suggested fretting-hand finger choices (the small numbers) and picking directions (for the first position only).

OK, that's the preliminaries dealt with: how do we start using this thing to make music in the context of triad-based harmonies? Clearly we can play it over a Major 7 chord with a flattened fifth, but that doesn't come up very often, so we're looking for ways to superimpose this arpeggio over some other chord that will sound good.

As with anything else, over a harmony with a given root note there are twelve possible Maj7b5 arpeggios we can play: the one built off the root, the one built off the b2, the one built off the 2 and so on. We can look at these in a table but that's not usually very enlightening. So how do we get started?

So a good start on those twelve applications is to use the Maj7b5 at the root as a substitute for the Lydian scale. Over CMaj7 play CMaj7b5 and you're off. Not wonderfully exciting, but this is one out of the twelve possibilities covered off, and you may enjoy the different lines you tend to create. You can mix in other Lydian scale notes, too.

This gives us an idea: if it works for Lydian, it should work for the other six Major Scale modes as well. For example, it turns out that if over a Cm7 chord I play DbMaj7b5, I get the notes Db, F, G and C; these are four of the seven notes in the Phrygian scale. If I want a Phrygian sound but I don't just want to run the scale, I can use this arpeggio instead to give me some more tasty intervallic choices without introducing any new notes.

These are actually not so hard to remember: in many cases the note you use to build the Maj7b5 arp is one of the characteristic notes in the scale. Learning these applications is a good way to internalise the arpeggio shapes and their sounds without stretching your ears too much at the beginning. Relating a new resource to something familiar is always a nice way to start.

I tried to find common scales (or modes of them) that relate to these applications the way the Major Scale modes related to the ones in the previous section, but these are quite hard to spot by eye (try it!). Here the technique I call "spectral analysis" is useful, because it takes the guesswork out of the process. Here, for example, is the 7-spectrum of the Maj7b5 arpeggio, take from my book Spectral Analysis of Scales

All these 7-note scales contain, somewhere within them, the Maj7b5 arpeggio. And since that accounts for four of their notes, to learn each scale we need only learn how to add another 3 notes to it. Most of these are very exotic indeed, but in the list we can see both Harmonic and Melodic Minor scales. How does the arp fit these modes? A bit of calculation gives us this table:

This gives us a way to start expanding our Maj7b5 vocabulary beyond the sounds of the Major Scale modes. There's already a lot to work with here, and even if you know your Harmonic and Melodic Minor modes fairly well I'm willing to bet you'll find something new here.

Notice, too, that the table now has at least one entry for all but three of the rows; in other words, we can "make sense of" all but three of the Maj7b5 superimpositions by thinking of them in terms of one or more fairly common 7-note scales.

This is all very well, but what about all those other scales in the list? The next ones that jump out for me are probably Neapolitan, Double Harmonic and Senavati, all scales I use fairly often but could always have a better knowledge of. It doesn't take long to find the modes of these scales that contain Maj7b5 arpeggios. This can be a good way to learn one of these scales, especially if the sound of the mode isn't familiar to you. This is a particular problem with the Neapolitan which, because it's "almost symmetrical", has modes that can sound very similar to each other.