I Wish I learned Arpeggios Like This (Beginner's Guide)

The #1 reason you’re struggling to make arpeggios sound like Jazz is because you’re leaving out the most important exercises.

After teaching Jazz for 20 years, I created a method that fixes this and helps students play solos that really flow and nail the changes.

So in this video, I will show you this simple method and how you can use it to turn arpeggios into solid Jazz lines.

The Most Basic Arpeggio

Let’s start with the simplest arpeggio, because even the basics can sound really amazing in Jazz. Here’s a one-octave G7 arpeggio. (I’ll show you why I start with this in just a second.)

To hear how this fits in context, listen to how it matches with this G7 chord, because connecting your lines to the harmony makes things a lot easier.

Now, let me first clear up a common misunderstanding: You’ve probably seen endless debates online—should you start with scales or arpeggios? People get really passionate about this!

But if you look at the solos of jazz greats, like this Charlie Parker phrase, you’ll see it’s a mix of scales and arpeggios.

Arpeggios are just the strong notes inside the scale. Scale and arpeggios fit together; they don’t fight each other. So, It’s not one or the other, it’s both.

For now, try playing this G7 arpeggio a few times. Get comfortable with the sound and the shape. Next, I’ll show you how to turn it into a real jazz lick.

Rhythm and Phrasing

There is one bad habit, which holds back a lot of beginners when using arpeggios: Always playing the arpeggio from the root and playing it ascending. You need that, but you also want more freedom! The most common suggestion for fixing this involves learning lots of complete positions and practicing even more exercises. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it is not efficient if you want to get better at soloing.

Instead, if you limit yourself to just a few notes while soloing, you’ll actually start to develop something a lot more valuable: new melodies and your sense of rhythm and phrasing. This is the secret behind the #1 jazz lick! This is about building your vocabulary, and especially developing it in terms of rhythm.

Think of the 4-note arpeggio as a scale and start improvising just using the arpeggio notes while focusing on making it sound great with rhythm and phrasing. Simple things like sliding into a note, in this case the 3rd:

Or using a pull-off to create more interesting dynamics in the line, here between F and D. This is the first type of Jazz lick: Arpeggio and rhythm

#1 Arpeggio And Rhythm

And when you try to make your own licks like this one, then start with a short 3 or 4-note phrase.

Or like this:

Once you have that, compose a longer lick. Play the first phrase and listen for what you can come up with as a follow-up. Don’t be afraid to just try some things. In the end, you will start sounding like this:

Composing licks is where you get much more free to play melodies and also where you can start developing better rhythmical ideas. Limitation can be a great way to level up your playing, but now we need to add some more notes to the mix!

There Are More Notes!

A lot of beginners make this mistake with arpeggios: treating them like they are isolated blocks you can’t change. But arpeggios are just part of the picture—there are other notes from the scale all around them, and you can use those notes to make your solos sound more melodic and natural.

It is really just as simple as adding a few scale notes between your arpeggio notes. Check out this example and notice, how you don’t have to start on beat 1 every time:

And you can still add phrasing to these busier lines, which gives you the second type of jazz lick:

#2 Mixing Scale and arpeggio

Once you start blending arpeggios with scale notes, you’ll find it’s much easier to create lines that flow and connect, just like the jazz greats. And there’s a great exercise to help you practice connecting arpeggios and scales. Let me show you!

The BEST arpeggio Exercise

Before we get into adding chromatic notes to your jazz vocabulary, let’s quickly cover the most important way to practice arpeggios. You already know how useful it is to connect arpeggios to the scale when you’re soloing, so it makes sense to focus on that connection in your practice, as well..

In this case, the G7 arpeggio is in the scale of C major.

A great exercise for any scale is to work on the diatonic arpeggios of the scale. The way you do that is by building an arpeggio from each note in the scale. It is easy: For every note in the scale you can stack 3rds and in that way, create first 3rds, then diatonic triads, and finally 7th chords for each note of the scale.

And If you play this for the C major scale, then you get this exercise:

This exercise builds an important connection, but you will see later how it also opens up a world of other options! Once this feels comfortable, you’ll be ready to add in chromatic notes and more rhythms. But first, try using these diatonic arpeggios to create your own jazz lines!

Chromatic Notes – Outside The Scale Are NICE!

One of the most fun things about Jazz is that you can use chromatic passing notes to create tension inside the line that then resolves. It’s a bit like adding hot sauce to your playing, a little is great and makes some bites hot, but you probably should not overdo it. First, check out this example, and then I’ll show you how you can turn that into some strategies and exercises to use yourself:

You have two kinds of chromatic approaches here, and both are important to know.

First, a leading note for the 3rd in the first chord run.

Chromatic leading notes often work better resolving to chord tones, and a great exercise is to add them to all the notes in the arpeggio. Adding a note a half step under each chord tone gives you this:

The other approach is in the middle of the line with two notes surrounding the 5th of G.the D.

This is a chromatic enclosure.

A chromatic enclosure is a short melody that moves to a target note, in this case, it is sort coming from the previous exercise but combining it with a scale note above the chord tone.

Again, you want to turn this into an exercise. Here you have an enclosures around each note in the arpeggio:

And if you have the feeling that your solos are just running up and down scales and arpeggios, then enclosures will completely save your playing. Now we have The 3rd type of Jazz Lick which adds chromaticism:

#3 Adding Chromaticism

This almost doesn’t sound like a G7 arpeggio anymore, but maybe that is also sort of the point? We are just getting started, because there are more arpeggios you can use over a G7 chord, not just the basic G7 arpeggio.

More Arpeggios On Every Chord?

Most beginners think you can only use the “official” arpeggio for each chord—like G7 arpeggio for a G7 chord. But great jazz players know there’s a whole system of hidden arpeggios you can use to unlock new sounds and melodies. Here’s how it works:

Look at the notes of G7, G, B, D, and F

The way it is constructed is by stacking 3rds, and if you add another 3rd on top then you have a G7(9) chord, but if you take away the lowest note, the G, then notice that now you have a Bø arpeggio

And that works over the G7 as well. If you use the Bø arpeggio and add some chromatic notes and phrasing you get this, which is the 4th type of Jazz lick:

#4 Arpeggio from the 3rd

This trick works everywhere: try Em7 over a Cmaj7 chord, or Fmaj7 over a Dm7 chord.

Suddenly, you’ve got a whole new toolkit for jazz lines. And you’ll see it everywhere if you check out solos from people like Joe Pass or Charlie Parker. And here’s the best part: you don’t always need inversions to get creative. This is one of the best Bebop tricks in the book—and it opens up a world of strong melodies.

One of the Best Things Barry Harris Taught Me!

Beginner Jazz licks can sound a bit robotic, just running up and down scales and arpeggios in a mechanical way. But here is a great Barry Harris’ technique that instantly fixes that. Usually, we play the arpeggio starting on the root and then up the arpeggio.

But instead you can move the root (the first note, G) up an octave.

To get this, which immediately sounds 10x more surprising without getting weird and abstract:

You could explain it in a different way as well, but this is easy on the guitar. Moving the note up an octave gives us that large interval skip that sounds so melodic. This is what Barry Harris called a pivot arpeggio, and again, this is something that works for all arpeggios, and you can create some really great lines with it. The 5th type of Jazz lick is a Pivot Arpeggio Bebob Lick, and notice the grace note on the low note as well: :

#5 Pivot arpeggio

The Source Of Amazing Bebop Techniques!

Barry Harris’s pivot arpeggios are a fantastic way to level up your jazz lines—but they’re just the front door. If you want to unlock the whole house of bebop, you need to check out Barry’s approach to chromatic notes. His chromatic scale method turns those “outside” notes into pure melody, and it’s the real secret behind those classic bebop sounds. Check out this video where I break it down and also talk about why Bebop scales are actually a waste of time!

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