Spice Up Your Chord Progressions with Arpeggios
When it comes to chord progressions, it’s easy to feel like you’re playing the same thing day in, day out. We’ve all felt trapped in the loop of repetitive rhythms and feel the urge to break out.
In this lesson we’re going to take a look at arpeggios and see how they can be a useful tool to help shape your chord progressions.
It’s easy to think of arpeggios as a lead guitar technique because most of the time when we hear about them, we hear about them being used as part of a sweep picking run, but they can be applied effectively to rhythm guitar playing too.
An arpeggio is when you split up a chord into separate notes. If we apply this concept to rhythm guitar playing, it means splitting a full chord up into different notes. The order in which you pick these notes can give you different results.
All of the arpeggio patterns in this lesson are based around two note per beat rhythms, but the direction of the pitch and the distance between notes varies across the examples. You can also experiment with rhythm changes and let certain notes ring longer, or shorter.
You can take some of these concepts and apply them to your own playing to create different arpeggios and really spice up your rhythm.
Example 1
This first arpeggio pattern just moves from the lowest note of the chord up to the highest. This is a pretty common form for chord arpeggios. You may see this in lots of ballad style songs.
Example 2
Arpeggios don’t always have to run from low to high. This example starts with the lowest note before jumping to a higher point and working back.
Example 3
This example breaks the linear feel up even more by doing repeating string skipped pairs through each chord.
Example 4
This final arpeggio is broken up into a low and high part on each chord. The low part ascends before dropping back on the final note and the higher part descends before raising up for the final note.
Notice the slight change in how the chord is played across the 2 chords in the final bar.