Major 9 Arpeggio Guitar

[Pernilla Gendron]

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.

If you're not able to play all over the fretboard, you're missing the foundation required to see the fretboard clearly. Build your foundation and put it all together with Guitar Essentials: Foundational Fretboard Navigation.

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.

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.

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:

Long time followers of my blog will recall a lesson I did on spread triads within the pentatonic scale. While many found that lesson useful, I have had requests to cover the basic pentatonic triads. If you are in a rut with your lead playing, and find yourself performing the same licks again and again, then this concept will help you develop new ideas in your improvisations.

I have chosen A minor as the key for demonstrating this concept because many guitarists are familiar with this scale. Here is a diagram of the A minor pentatonic scale in its first position. Additionally, I have labelled each note as it appears on the fretboard for quick reference. Furthermore, I have coloured the root note in red in every octave for ease of use:

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