Now that we have become familiar with how to play a few different kinds of chords, we can begin to speak more directly about arpeggios. An arpeggio is basically a chord that is played through one note at a time, rather than playing all the notes simultaneously.

In this section, we are not going to worry about the names of the chords we are playing, rather, we are only going to concern ourselves with the shape of the arpeggios we will be playing. Also, when using a pick, you want to pay very close attention to which direction your pick is heading in to insure a smooth delivery. We will write an arpeggio much like we write a chord, only we will add a ~ symbol in front of the brackets to denote that we are playing an arpeggio. With that said, let's get started with our first example.


Arpeggio 1:
~[A11pd, D9md, G8id, B9md, H7id]


Of course, you can play the above with all up strokes as well. Or, if you are really adventurous, you can use the following picking pattern.


~[A11pd, D9mu, G8id, B9mu, H7id]

To make things more interesting, let's drop the pick for a moment. For those of you playing acoustic guitars, this might not work out so well (however it is a challenging finger exercise nevertheless), but for those who are playing electric guitars, this is going to be lots of fun. What i want you to do is to place your index finger on H7. Now, take your right hand and lay it gently across the strings around the 5th fret. We do this to help keep the strings from making a lot of noise while we work the left hand. So, if you are ready, just slowly start to finger this pattern of notes.


Arpeggio 2:
~[H7i, H11p, H7i, B9m, G8i, D9m, A11p]

And from there, just come back down,

~[D9m, G8i, B9m, H7]


If you notice, we are back where we started and so you can cycle through this arpeggio shape indefinitely. Just practice it really slow a few times to get the overall shape and rythmic motion down and then relax your left hand and let loose and see how fast you can get your fingers to fly. If you start to get sloppy, go to using a metranome to help you keep your timing even. You won't believe how well this exercise is at getting your fretting hand in shape. Well, you are probably having lots of fun playing around with this technique, so I'll leave it to you for homework to practice it. Enjoy...


Corey J. Bray