This is the first in a series of lessons dealing with 7th chord arpeggios that I’m going to be publishing on my blog. Arpeggios are great to be familiar with because they allow you to play the notes of a particular chord while improvising, rather than just notes from the key. Though that’s a technique that’s associated with jazz playing, knowing where to find the notes of chords while soloing is very helpful in any style. If you are interested in jazz improvisation, it’s very important that you’re able to find the notes of a chord anywhere on the guitar at any given time. Learning these arpeggios will help you to begin seeing the chord tones.

In this first lesson, we’re going to cover some basic 7th chord arpeggios. In future lessons, I’ll talk about applying them to playing. If you start with this lesson, you should have no problem following along even if you have no experience with arpeggios. Here we go!

What are arpeggios?

An arpeggio is simply playing the notes of a chord as individual notes, rather than as a strummed chord. If you played a G Major 7 chord one note at a time, that would be considered arpeggiating the chord. But, when using them for improvising, people usually play arpeggios with different fingerings than they would if they were actually playing the chord. Those arpeggio fingerings are what I’m going to show you in this lesson.

The arpeggios we’re going to cover

We’re going to learn 8 different arpeggio fingerings. There are four main types of 7th chords. They are: Major 7, 7, Minor 7, and Minor 7b5. I’ll be showing you two fingerings for each, one starting on the 6th string and one starting on the 5th string. Just like with barre chords, it can be very helpful to know how to play each one off of each string, rather than just one.

Since each 7th chord has four different notes in it, each arpeggio will have four different notes. The arpeggio fingerings are going to be two-octave fingerings, though. This means that you will play each of the four notes twice, low and then high, and then end on the root note. The notes making up the arpeggios are:

Major 7 – 1, 3, 5, 7
7 – 1, 3, 5, b7
Minor 7 – 1, b3, 5, b7
Minor 7b5 – 1, b3, b5, b7

As you can see, these are the same notes that make up the chords. If you’re not familiar with numbering the notes of each chord, and you’d like to look into, it’s explained here in my lesson on triads.

And, here are the arpeggios!

Note: The program I use seems to only give you one option when naming a note that has a sharp or flat. If you’re using the standard notation rather than the tablature, please excuse the odd names for some of the notes. There doesn’t seem to be a way to choose which name any particular note is given.

Here are the four main 7th chord arpeggios with the root on the 6th string:

Arpeggios for the four main 7th chord types starting on G on the 6th string

And, here are 7th chord arpeggios with the root on the 5th string:

Arpeggios for the four main 7th chord types starting on C on the 5th string

Ok, now what?

For now, just practice playing through the arpeggios, gradually trying to memorize them. As you get familiar with them, if you can learn to identify the number of each note, that will prove to be very helpful, both with understanding arpeggios, and expanding your knowledge of the guitar neck in general. For example, in the first G major 7 arpeggio, in order, the notes are: 1, 3, 5, 7, 1, 3, 5, 7, 1.

If you already know some songs that use 7th chords, try applying the arpeggios by playing the correct arpeggio for each chord. Of course, to change the root note of any of the above arpeggios, simply move the fingering to any note you’d like to start it on. When you do this, try starting by playing all of the arpeggios starting on the 6th string, then starting on the 5th string, and eventually, mixing up arpeggios starting on both strings.

I hope that this lesson helps to learn some of the basic arpeggio fingerings! If you have any questions at all, please feel free to leave a comment, or contact me. I’ll do my best to respond to everyone.

Also, don’t hesitate to contact me if you’re in the area and are interested in guitar lessons in Chicago.

Thanks for checking out my blog and have fun!