Tag Archives: chord shapes

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 […]

If you’re familiar with the CAGED system, then you know it’s a way to use open chord shapes to map out guitar chords all over the fretboard. But the system goes far beyond just chords to incorporate arpeggios, pentatonic scales, and diatonic scales. In this lesson we’re going to look at an exercise that that […]

In a previous lesson we explored the major add9 arpeggio, which is derived from the major add9 chord. In this lesson we’re going to take a look at the beautifully melodic arpeggio, the minor add9 arpeggio. We’ll look at how they’re built and the explore the common arpeggio shapes on the guitar.

While the most common arpeggios are the major and minor arpeggios, arpeggios can be formed from any chord. In this lesson we’re going to take a look at major add9 arpeggios, including how they’re built and the common arpeggio shapes on the guitar.

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.

A capo is a device that allows us to raise the pitch of the open string notes. It clamps across the strings on the guitar fretboard to fret all strings at a given fret, acting as a movable nut on the guitar. As you’ll see in this lesson, a capo can be very useful for transposing songs while maintaining the ability to use open chord shapes.

In this lesson we’re going to dive into the E minor chord scale, which is simply the chords that are found in the key of E minor. We’ll take a look at how they’re formed, methods for practicing the chord scale, and some sample chord progressions.

One of the best things about the guitar is its grid-like structure of notes. While it takes time to learn, it’s extremely powerful in providing us with shapes and patterns that can be moved up and down the fretboard to form any chord, triad, scale, or arpeggio of the same quality.