In this lesson, I would like to continue along the line of examining Arpeggios. So, let's begin by looking at yet another popular arpeggio form. As in our last example, we are going to hold down H7 with our index finger, and rest our right hand across the strings around the 5th fret to dampen out any excess string noise. So, here we go.


Arpeggio 3:
~[H10p, H7i, B8m, G7i, D9r, A10p]


And coming back, we have,

~[D9r, G7i, B8m, H7i]


From here, you can cycle through the fingering indefinitely once you become familiar with the shape of this arpeggio. Now, it is important to note that what we are doing in an exercise like this is called hammer ons. Because we are striking or hammering on notes without picking them. In the future, I will notate a hammer on by putting parentheses around the note being hammered on. So, this will require a closer examination of the notation with your cursor in a lot of cases. For example, you might have something like,

A7id, (A10)p,D7i, (D9)r

So, the parentheses indicate that after we pick A7, we hammer on A10, then pick D7 and hammer on D9. In fact, this is a great finger exercise to play over and over again to get used to mixing in your picking with hammer ons. Also, if you think about this exercise as a shape, you can play it through and then jump to A9i, and keep running this exercise up the neck skipping frets as you go to break up the monotony of simply moving linearly up the neck. In Calculus, we would call such linear motions monotonically increasing. Because the function is always increasing and never changing direction over the interval of interest. So, even in music, Calculus has its place.

This next example is a shape I learned from Joe Satriani's Mystical Potato Head Groove off his Flying in a Blue Dream CD. It's a little arpeggio shape he would break into in the background with machine like precision, so this one will likely only be perfected by spending hours with a metranome. Place your right hand over the 9th fret to dampen the strings, and as you will notice, every note in this arpeggio, even the starting note, is a hammer on.

Arpeggio 4:
~[(E12)i, (A14)m, (D16)p, (G12)i, (B15)m, (H17)p]


Some folks may want to use their ring finger on B15 instead of their middle finger. I suppose it is a matter of what feels better to the individual. Personally, I think learning it both ways is a worth while endeavor. Now, I don't recall off hand precisely where it is that Joe started playing this shape on the neck. It has been years since I played along with that CD. But, I always enjoyed the challenging finger work that went into running this shape smoothly. The real challenge is not running down the notes, the real challenge is running down, going back up, and immediately coming back down again without screwing up. It's not difficult to do slowly, but getting it smooth and fast will take a lot of effort. Your fretting hand will have a tendency to want to naturally tense at the turn around points on the high and low E strings. And that is typically the point where most folks mess up. When playing arpeggios, you want to start training yourself mentally to relax your fretting hand as much as you can. Think of it this way, the less tense you are when you hammer on a string, the less you have to fight the tension and momentum of your fingers to smoothly execute the arpeggio. So, your homework this time is to play this arpeggio forwards and backwards and while you do so, I want you to imagine in your mind that you are pressing lightly on a cloud. You may not believe it now, but this is one of the single most important mental/physical connection exercises that guitarists need to do but fail to grasp the importance of. This idea of practicing to have a light touch when running arpeggios is one of the major reasons a professional guitarist can fly across the fretboard and the novices sit there wondering how to get their fingers to move at a fraction of the speed that the professionals employ.


Corey J. Bray