Arpeggio Practice for Guitar
… and other instruments as well.
Practice Your Scales and Arpeggios
No matter what kind of musician you may be, arpeggios are simple sets of notes that can help us find our way across any instrument. An arpeggio can be thought of as the skeleton to the body of a scale. By using the location of notes in an arpeggio to see where they lie on our instruments can help us access the rest of a scale.
Rather than showing you arpeggios by note I’ll be focusing on degrees as well. For guitar players, using degrees makes simple three note arpeggios accessible no matter what key or scale you are using. Keep in mind that this information is not limited to the guitar. We can use the same note and degree combinations on any instrument because we are playing one note at a time.
Major Triad Arpeggios
The major triad is a three note chord consisting of degrees 1, 3, and 5. This can be a C major triad of C-E-G, an Eb major triad of Eb-G-Bb, or an F# major triad of F#-A#-C# because these three notes all fit the degree formula of 1-3-5.
Using the above guitar chart, we have a fretboard and strings, but no fret markers to show our position up and down the neck. That is because we do not need fret markers. All we need is the triangle shape between degrees 1, 3, and 5. Check out the blue shapes that are made in 1-3-5 sets.
Every time that we move from 5 to the next 1 we move up along green arrows. The only time we deviate from this is when we move from the third-string to the second-string. For those of you who do not play guitar. The strings are numbered 1 through 6 from top (thinnest) to bottom (thickest). This offset between strings 3 and 2 is odd at first but becomes useful once we start moving in fifths.
The Five-to-One Relationship
From the major triad arpeggio pattern, we can see that the fifth degree of a tonic note is just below it until we get to that third-string to second-string offset. The offset takes us on a slight diagonal and then continues moving up in a five-to-one relationship.
Notice how this path of five-to-one movements lets us wrap back around and start again on the next fret to the right. This is because the notes on the first and sixth strings are the same. They are just two octaves apart.
This movement of five-to-one across the strings and through the frets allows us to know where the fifth of any note is. This is one step towards understanding how the fret board operates so that you can begin to play anything in any key. But let’s take this one step at a time and look at our minor triad arpeggios.
Minor Triad Arpeggios
The minor triad sets us up like the major triad because we have degrees 1 and 5. The only difference is that our third degree is flattened. The minor-third is located just to the left of the major-third on the fretboard. Our major and minor patterns are almost identical which makes them the easiest triad arpeggios to learn. With these two similar patterns we can now play arpeggios over six out of seven chords that are found in any major or minor key.
To be more specific on what this unlocks for us we need to think about our chords. We can pick out a major key like C and play Am, Dm, G, C. It’s a standard vi-ii-V-I progression. Instead of playing some of the chords we can play their arpeggios instead. Now a Dm chord can be a Dm arpeggio with the notes D, F, and A. Finding any D note on the fretboard gets us started. Then we just follow the pattern for a minor triad arpeggio, and we will always land on D, F, and A as degrees 1, b3, and 5.
Unlocking Scales and Modes
Once we are able to play major and minor arpeggios mixed with chords we can expand into scales and modes. Check out some of my articles that talk about scales and modes where I point out the degrees used. With a scale formula we can find the other notes because they are relative to our arpeggios.
Above we have an excerpt of our minor triad arpeggio with the 4th degree added. Just like with a sus4 chord, we can suspend a melody’s third degree to the fourth degree. When we want to locate the fourth degree it is found just above the tonic note. We can also locate it right between degrees b3 and 5. This is incredibly helpful because all three minor modes (Dorian, Aeolian, and Phrygian) have degrees 1, b3, 4, and 5.
Now mastering a scale or mode is easier because we don’t have to learn every position right away, instead we can use arpeggios and add note/degrees one at a time. As we learn other scales and modes we can rely on the intervals, or distances between degrees, to remain the same. Degrees b3, 3, 4, and 5 will always be the same distance from degree 1 no matter what degree 1 is. Then you can add in the other degrees one at a time until you have every position relative to 1 memorized. At that point the fretboard is yours to control.
Thanks for reading. I hope these articles help you to find new ways to learn and enjoy music. Please let me know if you’ve found this information helpful in the comments below. Thank you!
