I wanted to start creating some articles, applying some of the ideas that I’ve covered earlier in these posts. A subject ripe for discussion is patterns and arpeggios for sweeping on the guitar.
Now as you may be aware, I’m not a pick user myself, but I do apply many of the principles to my own guitar playing. In the case of sweeping, I may rake a finger across the strings, or even tremolo pick them. Either way, having a consistent left hand technique greatly aids in executing arpeggios, irrespective of how you play them, and that’s what I’m going to be discussing.
So the basic approach to a sweeping arpeggio on the guitar is to play one note per string over a number of strings in one continuous down or upstroke. When you change direction, you can either play 2 notes on a string or else pick 2 and slur 1. (There are plenty of videos on YouTube that will demonstrate the right hand technique, my own favorites being by Frank Gambale).
So if I wanted to create a Guitar Fretboard Pattern to describe this, a good handy one to get to know is 2-1-1-1-2 (follow this link to find out more about these patterns).
As you can see, this is a 5 string pattern, which creates a 12 note cycle, if you play up and down the neck.
So I look at the extended arpeggio patterns, and see that I can easily map this to all 3 different inversions of Major and Minor inversions. These are my particular favorites.
Hopefully reading this is relatively straight forward.
- White notes are to be ignored.
- Black notes are the played root notes.
- Blue notes are the played 3rd and 5th tones.
If I draw a similar set of charts for Minor Arpeggios, I have.
I hope you can see that the 3 sets of arpeggios are by no means an exhaustive list of 2-1-1-1-2 patterns. And neither are these the only route through the shapes.
Spend some time and see if you can come up with your own variants. How would you create an 8 note pattern, for example?
type=pings Trackbacks For This Post