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.
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!
Recently, I purchased my first ‘real’ camera. I’ve only had it for about 5 days, so very recently, actually. I’ve been pretty excited about learning to use it and went out in my neighborhood the day after I got it trying to shoot pictures in manual mode for the first time. I saw one of my flyers hanging, and thought it’d be fun to take a picture of what one looks like after hanging in my neighborhood in Chicago for about a year.
I promise not to turn this into a photography blog with my ultra-amateur pictures!
I’ve posted several lessons explaining the major triads and how to use them. Here is a link to those guitar lessons, in case you’d like to check them out. This lesson is going to talk about making some cool sounding chords by just changing one note of basic major and minor triads. Once you have the basic triad voicings down, these new chords shouldn’t be very difficult to learn and can produce some interesting sounds. Check it out!
For the time being, I’m going to take a little break from writing about triads. This lesson is going to be about a great major scale exercise that I think is really helpful in opening up how you see the guitar neck. This was shown to me by the great New York guitarist Sheryl Bailey during my first semester at Berklee when I took guitar lessons with her. I take no credit for inventing it, but it helped me a great deal, so I thought I’d pass it on.
The General Idea
The idea of this exercise is to play through all 12 major scales in one single position on the guitar. It can be kind of tricky and take some time and brain work to see all of the scales in one single position, but it is well worth it. Like I said above, it can really open up how you see the guitar neck by making you familiar with lots of fingerings for the major scale that you may have not played before. Also, doing this exercise thoroughly in several positions will greatly expand your ability to see the relationships between notes of the major scale.
It’s time for another installment in the triad guitar lessons I’ve been posting. While after this lesson I may move on to other topics and return to triads a little later, I wanted to post a lesson dealing the major triads on strings 1-3. If you’re just tuning in, here is where you can find part 1 of the triad guitar lessons, which covers major triads on strings 2-4, as well as the basic idea and construction of triads. And, here you can find part 2 of the triad guitar lesson, which covers using the triads on strings 2-4 to be able to play a standard I-IV-V chord progression.
While this post isn’t really a full lesson, I just wanted to have a diagram up for the major scale because it will be referred to often in the lessons that I post. The major scale is important for its usefulness in playing and writing, as well as its importance in understanding music theory. First, learn the scale in the position I wrote it in, which is G Major. Once you have that, it’s good to also practice it starting on different frets of the guitar.
Ok, so, now that you’ve gotten familiar with the G triad and its inversions in my first guitar lesson on triads, we’re going to start talking about using the exact same chord voicings (major triads on strings 2-4) to play a chord progression. As an example, I will show you how to mix up the triad voicings to come up with some cool ways of playing a I-IV-V chord progression in the key of G. If you’re unfamiliar with the roman numeral system of numbering chords, that will be coming up in a future lesson! For right now, you just need to know that the chord progression will be: G-C-D.
This post is going to be the first in a series of guitar lessons about the triad chord family. Triads are awesome! When I’m teaching guitar lessons at my studio in Chicago, I like to teach them to students after they are familiar with open chords and barre chords. I like them because they give a smaller-voicing alternative to playing major and minor chords, and also because learning them can really open up how you see the guitar neck. Here we go!
What are Triads?
Let’s start by getting a basic understanding of what triads are. A triad is a major or minor chord made up of only three notes. Every major or minor chord is actually only made of 3 different notes. In standard open chord and barre chord shapes, though, some of the notes are doubled. When people refer to the triad chord voicings, they are usually refering to a voicing where you only play the 3 notes without doubling any of them.
I play a lot of different kinds of music and one of the bands I perform with regularly in Chicago is The Jordan Years, a soul/funk/hip-hop group. Recently we’ve been working on a collaboration with the long-running Chicago comedy troupe Schadenfreude and calling it The City That Works. We had the opportunity to play at the great Chicago venue Martyrs’ as part of the TBS Just For Laughs Festival with Rhymefest as a special guest. Though I didn’t know who he was beforehand, he’s a hip-hop artist from Chicago who, among other things, has won a Grammy award for writing the Kanye West song “Jesus Walks.” I don’t play a ton in this clip, but still thought it’d be fun to post. Especially since I don’t have many video clips of myself playing!
If you’re interested in checking out The City That Works, we’ll be performing on July 8th at Lincoln Hall.
A lot of my students ask about tracks they can play along with. This is a really cool blues guitar course that gives you backing tracks to play along with, as well as blues guitar instruction.
I think actually getting the chance to play solos is the best way to practice. Plus, it makes it way more FUN!
