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Improvisation Tools - Part 2: Arpeggios
(23 Jan 03)
Part 2: Enter at Your Own Risk
!!! WARNING !!!
FOR MAD(WO)MEN ONLY
Well, well, you really want to ignore the warning and declare yourself as a madman.
Welcome to the club!
Before you take the challenge and work through the second part of the article I highly recommend that you have already spent some time with the first chapter. If you feel comfortable with the different patterns for all chord families (I mean all, not only maj7) you can take the next steps to work with arpeggios on the entire neck. In this part I describe the way I took to really deepen the topic arpeggios / chord tones. This method covers the experiences and experiments of approximately 4 years (and I am not done with all possibilities). So take your time with it. Think about whether this stuff makes sense to you and how you could apply it to your playing.
The goal we are trying to reach is to attain a kind of freedom on the guitar neck, meaning the ability to play freely without thinking in positions and focusing more on possibilities of how arpeggios can be played. You will find a lot of similar thoughts in the article about Pentatonics.
I will explain every topic by using the Cmaj7 arpeggio.
Enough talk. Let's jump right into it.
Major 7 Arpeggios in 12 Positions
Before combining the different patterns we have to explore all possibilities of playing in position. One characteristic of arpeggios is that they can be played in every position on the guitar with a reasonable result regarding fingering. But first we have to define the word position:
The actual position you are in is determined by a half step below the location of your 2nd finger. When your 2nd finger is on the 3rd fret you are in 2nd position, when it's on the 7th fret you are in 6th position.
Here are the 12 positions and fingerings for Cmaj7 without using open strings. Notice that some positions are very closely related and need only a different set of fingers to be played.
If you are up to it, you can apply the exercises on page 8 to all 12 fingerings - but don't get too carried away with it. It's more that you are able to see how the different fingerings cover the entire neck.
Exercise 1: take a chord tone out of the Cmaj7 chord, play this note with your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th finger and examine which pattern you are in.
Example: b on the high e string
Repeat this exercise - with all chord tones of the Cmaj7 chord
- by starting on each individual string
- with different maj7 chords
Exercise 2: improvise with focus on what pattern you are playing
There are different ways how you could approach this exercise.
here's an example:
- record a Cmaj7 vamp
- start improvising using the pattern in 2nd position.
- after a couple of bars move up to the 3rd position
- then move to 4th position etc...
It is important that you focus on the fingerings and on picturing the patterns (don't be discouraged if the musical output is not that great).
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Combining Positions >> |
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