Tag Archives: how to use arpeggios guitar

How To Use Arpeggios In Jazz – Important Skills

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Like everybody else, you are trying to play jazz and improvise solos, but it is difficult not to sound mechanical or robotic because you can really only choose between playing either a scale or an arpeggio which makes your solo boring. You need to learn how to use arpeggios in your solo lines in a more creative way!

In this video, I am going to give you 4 different ways to create melodies with arpeggios that you can add to your vocabulary and really change up how your solos sound.

In fact, with these techniques, you can take any chord and make a lick over that using diatonic arpeggios.

The Arpeggio and How To Practice Them

First, let’s look at a simple way to learn and think about arpeggios in the context of the scale then I will get into how you use this to make lines.

When you play jazz lines then the chords often change very often so it makes sense to mostly use arpeggios in one octave.

That means that you can get a lot out of practicing arpeggios in the scale as diatonic arpeggios in an exercise like this.

First the scale :

and then these arpeggios:

I have another lesson where I talk about this and how to use it that you can check it out here: The Most Important Scale Exercise In Jazz

Now let’s get to using scale notes, arpeggio patterns and chromaticism to make some great jazz lines with arpeggios.

1 Adding Diatonic notes

The easiest way to create strong melodies with arpeggios is to mix them with the scale tones.

If you take a Cmaj7 arpeggio and then add scale notes between the chord tones then you can make lines like this:

The way you should practice and work with this is probably more spending time figuring out how to make your own lines than practicing the exercises.

2 Arpeggio patterns

The next place to explore is to start playing the notes of the arpeggio in a different order. Below are a few examples of how you can do this:

If you use this in a lick then it could be something like example 6 and 7:

3 Chromatic notes

Another great feature is to use chromatic leading notes in an arpeggio. As an exercise you can add a chromatic leading note before every note in the arpeggio as shown in example 8:

Making lines with this and some of the previous concepts would give you something like these examples:

4 Inversions and Octave Displacement

Arpeggios can be inverted and you can also use octave displacement to create some very solid melodies that also contain larger intervals.

Doing exercises like this is really good for getting flexible with arpeggios, but you can also just take out one and work with that.

Octave displacement is another way to break up the direction of a melody. The idea is to have a melody is moving in one direction and then move a part of the melody an octave up or down. You can find an explanation of it in this lesson in Jazz Lick #4: Jazz Licks on a Maj7 chord – How To Sound Like Bebop

Some examples of licks on a Cmaj7 using Octave displacement and inversions are shown here below:

If you want to explore more things you can do with arpeggios and take it more into a bebop direction then check out 3 Easy Bebop Licks – How To Sound Like Jazz

Want to learn how to use this on a song?

Lady Bird – Arpeggios & Pentatonic Scales

Or check out the Easy Jazz Standards Bundle with this lesson at a reduced price:

Easy Jazz Standards Solo Bundle

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Three Ways to Add Arpeggios to Your Jazz Guitar Licks

We spend a lot of time practicing and learning Arpeggios, so it makes a lot of sense to have several ways to use them in our playing. In this lesson I will show you 3 ways you can add arpeggios to your lines so that they help you create more interesting licks and you get more out of the time you have spend practicing.

The examples in this lesson are all on a II V I in Eb major, so Fm7, Bb7 to Ebmaj7.

Emphasizing a Target note

Really bringing out interesting extensions and alterations is a great way to use arpeggios.

In the example below the target note G, the 9th, is given an extra emphasis because it is the top note in an arpeggio. The note is given even more energy by the fact that the arpeggio is played as an 8th note triplet. This heightens the velocity towards it and makes it sound more like a resolution. The fact that the G is on a heavy beat also helps give it more emphasis.

Learn from Charlie Parker and Wes Montgomery

Playing arpeggios and using the top note as a target is something that has been common in Jazz since Charlie Parker. Wes Montgomery also uses 5 or 6 note arpeggios to bring out specific targets in his solo. A recent video I did on his playing talked about his use of this to emphasize the 11th over a minor chord.

Moving this to the Eb major II V I then that would be:

In the example above the Ab major triad is used to target the Bb on beat 3. The arpeggio is really useful and the technique of summing up your lines in the important target notes can be useful to realize this and also for a lot of other things in the line.

Changing direction and adding large intervals

Playing lines that consist of melodies that only move in one direction can become boring and predictable for the listener. Arpeggios and especially arpeggio inversions can help doing this really well. If you look at the general movement from Fm7 to Bb it is a scale run from C to F and then moving from Eb to D on the Bb7.

The arpeggio is here used to introduce a skip from F down to Ab. From there it moves back up to then return to the D.

Change direction on Chord tones

The strong place to do this is to use it when you are on a chord tone. In the example above it was on the root (F). Below I am using the same technique but now the arpeggio is inserted on the 3rd(Ab). The arpeggio I use is a 1st inversion Abmaj7 arpeggio.

Coltrane and his descending Arpeggio Cascades

The previous technique used the arpeggio to introduce a large interval skip which is then resolved by the rest of the arpeggio. In the example below I am using a quote from John Coltrane’s Cousin Mary Solo, a song off “Giant Steps”

One way to summarize the Fm7 bar is to see it as a three note descending scale run: Bb, Ab, G with two arpeggios inserted after the last two notes. The arbeggios are an Fm 2nd inversion triad and an Abmaj7.

This melody is more radical but therefore also more dramatic and surprising. This probably has to do with the fact that the large interval skip is at the end of the arpeggio and not at the beginning. At the same time the dramatic cascade effect is a great way to shake things up a little.

For me personally this is a great example of how powerful Coltrane’s melodic concept was!

Use what you Practice and explore what is possible!

Exploring how to use the things we practice is almost as important as practicing them in the first place. Of course there are many ways we can do this, both by composing and experimenting but certainly also by transcribing and analyzing. 

This lesson demonstrates both transcribing and composing as examples, and for me those are the two main sources of inspiration and knowledge when it comes to applying what I practice.

Get a free E-book

If you want to download a Free E-book of 15 II Valt I licks then subscribe to my newsletter:

Get the PDF!

You can also download the PDF of my examples here:

Three ways to Use Arpeggios in Scale Runs

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for topics then please let me know. Leave a comment on the video or  send me an e-mail. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make them fit what you are searching for.

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and feel free to connect with me via Instagram,Twitter Google+ or Facebook to keep up to date with new lessons, concerts and releases.