The Major Chord Arpeggio is, not surprisingly, based on the chord tones of the Major chord. These are the root, 3rd and 5th notes of the Major Scale.
So the intervals look like this.
Let’s map these notes onto the neck of a guitar, starting with one octave only.
As you can see, there are quite a few different ways of playing these 3 chord tones!
Lets extend these ideas into 2 octaves, by adding a second octave above or below the first and attempting to stay in the same position on the neck of the guitar.
As you can see, I’ve grayed out three repeated shapes, giving us ten sets of two octave fingerings.
Finally lets throw away the repeated shapes and add in any other notes that can be easily reached without moving out of our current position.
Some are definitely easier to play than others, so work on your favorites to start with. Get to know these, because they’ll give you a different context to work with when you’re improvising and help you to break out of a linear scaler thinking that people often fall into when working with scales only.
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Topics: Arpeggios, Scales