Welcome to part 2 of the series of guitar lessons on 7th chord arpeggios that I’m publishing on my blog. If you missed the beginning, and you’re not familiar with arpeggio fingerings for the four main types of seventh chords, here’s where you can find the first arpeggio guitar lesson.

Applying the Arpeggios to a Chord Progression

Now that we’ve gone over fingerings starting on both the 6th and the 5th string for the four main types of 7th chord arpeggios, we’re going to go over an exercise designed to help you start using the arpeggios to play over an actual chord progression.

The chord progression below is similar to the song “Autumn Leaves” and we’ll be using it to practice playing the appropriate arpeggios over chord changes. Rather than starting out by just trying to improvise over the chord changes with the arpeggios, I’m going to give you an exercise that will help you to get familiar with where the arpeggios are on the guitar for each chord of the song.

A chord progression you can use to practice applying the arpeggio fingerings

Here’s what you’ll do:

For each chord of the song, you’ll play the arpeggio in eighth notes for the length of the chord. Since most chords of the song last for one measure, you’ll mainly be playing up the first eight notes of the arpeggio for each chord. Here’s what you would play for the first 3 chords:

Example of playing the arpeggio for each chord ascending in eigth notes

In bars 16-17 and bars 32-33, the E-7 chord lasts for two measures. In those measures, you can actually play the arpeggio up and down since you have two measures of eigth notes for one chord. In bars 28-29, where the chords only last for half of a measure, you will only play four notes for each arpeggio.

Steps to completing this exercise:

• Go through the entire song playing the arpeggio for each chord slowly. Do it out of time at first, making sure all of the notes sound clean and clear. It’s up to you which arpeggios you want to start on the 6th string and which you want to start on the 5th string, but at first it might be best to keep it consistent
• Once you feel comfortable with the locations and fingerings of the arpeggios for the chords of the song, do it with a metronome. I would recommend starting around 100-120 (or 50-60 if you are using the metronome to click on beats 2 and 4).
• Practice the exercise with the metronome until you’re able to play the arpeggios for the whole song smoothly and in time.
• Reverse the string on which you start each arpeggio. For example, if you played the first three chords like my example above, with A-7 on the 6th string, D7 on the 5th string, and G Major 7 on the 6th string, you will now play A-7 on the 5th string, D7 on the 6th string, and G Major 7 on the 5th string. Repeat the steps above for the new fingerings and do this until you can play it this way with the metronome as well.

Ok, I can do the exercise. Now what?

Being able to do the exercise above is just the beginning of learning to use the arpeggios. While learning the location for each arpeggio of the song is a very strong foundation for improvising with them, you’ll want to spend some time just playing over the chord changes using the arpeggios. I recommend starting out slowly and out of time and trying to play only notes from each chords arpeggio. Work on being able to connect the arpeggios smoothly and make melodies. When you start to get comfortable with that, try doing it with the metronome or a backing track and improvising over the chord progression in real time. Like most things with the guitar, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it! It may at first seem difficult to make music with the arpeggios, but that’s only because you’ve just learned them. As you improvise with them more and more, you’ll increasingly feel that you can play ‘musically’ with them.

I hope you enjoyed this lesson! There will be more to come soon. Please feel free to comment or contact me if you have any questions.

If you’re in the area and are interested in guitar lessons in Chicago, or you have any questions, here is where you can contact me. Also, if you just stumbled onto this page, here is my guitar blog.

Have fun!