Jazz Guitar 101: Arpeggios

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This is the first lesson in a series of jazz guitar beginner lessons. I'll be covering all the basic building blocks needed to play jazz guitar, a jazz guitar 101. In this tutorial we'll be covering how arpeggios are used in jazz guitar music and how to play arpeggios on a guitar.

An arpeggio is a broken chord, where the notes of the chord are played in succession.

Arpeggios are a good base for improvisation over chord progressions. By playing the chord tones in your guitar solo you reflect the harmony of the tune in your solo, something that makes your improvisation interesting to listen to.

It's important that you know every arpeggio in all positions of the guitar neck. This can be a bit daunting in the beginning, but with regular practice you can play any arpeggio without thinking. In this tutorial we'll be starting with some basic positions, no need to learn them all at once.

All arpeggios are of the movable type, I'll explain you at the end of this page what that means.

1) 2 5 1 Position A

We're going to learn the basic arpeggios by looking at some common chord progressions. The most common chord progression in jazz is the 2 5 1. In this example we'll be working in the key of G major:

|Am7    |D7    |Gmaj7    |%    |
|II     |V     |I        |     |

To play over this kind of chord progression, we'll need 3 kinds of arpeggios: minor, dominant and major. Here's the arpeggio for the Am7 chord:

 : represents the root or 1 of the guitar chord. The letter inside the box is the note name.

 : blue squares represent a chord tone other than the 1.

To practice this minor arpeggio, play it like this until it jumps out of your fingers without having to think about it:

You can also practice it by first playing the chord and then the arpeggio, a good exercise for your ears:

We go on to the D7 chord:

Start by practicing this dominant arpeggio like this:

Like the minor arpeggio examples, you can also play the chord before the arpeggio as an exercise.

And then we arrive at the Gmaj7 chord:

Practice this major arpeggio the way we did for the minor and dominant arpeggio (start on the root).

Ok, we know the basic positions for the arpeggios, now we're going to combine them:

This is an example of how you can combine the arpeggios. It's not very musical at this point, but being able to play them like this is a necessary step in the learning process. Let's have a look at another example, starting from a different place:

Now start improvising over these chord changes using only these arpeggios. You can start on any note you want or use any rhythm you want, although for educational purposes it's better to play a long stream of 8-notes like in the examples. To make sure you change chords at the right place you can use software like Band in a Box (or you can do the hard work yourself and record the changes with a metronome).

Good to know: all arpeggios are movable. If you know the arpeggio for Am7 you can use that same 'shape' to find the arpeggios for other minor chords. Let's say you want to find the arpeggio for Gm7. All we have to do is slide the arpeggio for Am7 2 frets down. So instead of starting on the 5th fret in case of Am7, we start on the 3rd fret for Gm7. This is the result:

You move the root to the appropriate note on the string and play the shape from there. Another example: we know the arpeggio shape for D7, so it's easy to find B7:

Good, we just touched the very basics of arpeggios, of course there are other chord types, positions and techniques. Stay tuned for a next episode coming soon!

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Arpeggios Part 2
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