Tag Archives: arpeggios

The minor 7 flat 5 arpeggio is one of those sounds that instantly adds tension to your playing—especially in blues and minor-key progressions. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at the five movable minor 7♭5 arpeggio shapes across the fretboard, complete with tabs, interval diagrams, and suggested fingerings to help you visualize how each shape is built.

Once you have the basic major and minor arpeggios down, it’s good to expand your repertoire of arpeggios. After all, arpeggios are as plentiful as chords. In this lesson we’re going to take a look at major 6 arpeggios, which make for a flavorful and melodic addition to your vocabulary. Major 6 Arpeggio Formula The […]

I love to work from arpeggios when improvising and creating musical lines. It’s so easy to create a melody with them and they can be easily expanded upon with scales. In this lesson we’re going to work through a simple musical exercise for applying arpeggios and scales to the guitar.

With the guitar there are limitless ways we can go about practicing things like scales, chords, and arpeggios. Something I’ve found fun is to incorporate other music elements or concepts as a way to guide a practice session. One such method is by using the circle of fifths to provide structure to practicing arpeggios. Circle […]

On the guitar there are a number of techniques that are fundamental to playing the instrument. Slides are one of those techniques. While it’s a basic technique, there’s nuance to getting it clean and crisp as you move between notes. In this lesson we cover some basic guitar sliding exercises that will level up your technique.

Navigating the guitar fretboard can be quite daunting. It’s a grid of notes that, when taken at face value, offers little insight into the nature of how it works. But if we drill down and start applying the basic structures of music to the guitar, interconnected shapes and patterns start to emerge that help you map out the fretboard.

If you’ve been a reader of this site for any length of time, you know I’m a huge advocate of the CAGED system. It’s so valuable for learning guitar and it makes navigating the fretboard so much easier. For that reason, I’ve put a lot of time into putting all of the pieces of the CAGED system together. In this lesson, we’re going to go through one of my favorite CAGED system soloing exercises that helps you map the CAGED system to the fretboard in a fun and musical way.

In this lesson we’re going to break down the iconic riff of The House of the Rising Sun by The Animals. It’s pretty straightforward as far as the progression, but does offer some nuanced picking patterns over arpeggiated chords that can be a little tricky to play.

There are many ways to go about soloing over chord changes, but it essentially comes down to outlining the chords in the progression to highlight the changes. In this lesson we’ll take a look at some simple options for playing over chord changes that work in a writing setting as well as for improvisation.