Improvising on the Guitar — With Arpeggios (and Pentatonic)

What is an arpeggio and how can you improvise with it?

An arpeggio, as discussed several times before, is the individual notes of a chord. So, for example, for a C chord to sound like an actual C chord, it needs its three notes C, E, and G.

If we play these individually one after the other, we call it an arpeggio. The verb is “arpeggiated.” So, playing a C chord arpeggiated means you should play the notes individually.

How do you improvise with arpeggios?

Improvising with arpeggios is very correct, but also very boring. You’re practically just playing the exact same notes as the underlying chord again… just individually.

So let’s assume we have the chords: C, Am, F, G.

Now there are two possibilities; either, we orient ourselves to the chords and play the corresponding arpeggios of the chord. So with C we would play a C major arpeggio, with Am an A minor arpeggio, and so on.

The other option would be to orient ourselves to the key and play any scale of that key. We are in the key of “C major” and could accordingly play one of these scales. Ideally, we would even play the right scales, such as C Ionian over the C chord, A Aeolian over the A minor chord, F Lydian over the F chord, and G Mixolydian over the G chord.

Last but not least, of course, also simply A minor pentatonic!

So on the one hand, we now have enough information to start improvising, but on the other hand, it’s too much to just get started. So now we try to bring a little structure into the whole thing.

Right Note on the First Beat

If we were to theoretically play an arpeggio note on the first beat and fill the remaining beats with any random notes from a suitable scale, it would sound neither boring nor wrong. So let’s do exactly that.

Here we see all the notes between the 5th and 8th fret on the guitar. You could also do this with other frets. However, I did it this way because most people already know the pentatonic very well and are therefore very familiar with this range.

I have now marked the pentatonic in the 5th fret (A minor pentatonic) with chromatic notes in between and then green. So we have one fret for each finger of the left hand. Fret 5 is with the index finger, fret 6 with the middle finger, and so on.

Now we improvise over our chords given above; C, Am, F, G.

So we play the root of the chord on the first beat. The root of the C major chord is accordingly: C

We now play the root C on the first beat (let’s assume it’s a 4/4, then there would be a total of four beats per measure). We fill the remaining notes with any notes from the A minor pentatonic. Again: Beat 1 = root C, Beat 2+3+4 any notes from the pentatonic in A minor.

Now we do the same with the other three chords. On the first beat we play one of the red notes.

With the F chord we play one of these red notes (root F) on the first beat accordingly

And again the same with the root G.

Theoretically, you should now play everything correctly. Even if you should play something strange or wrong after the respective root notes. Of course it always sounds much better if you know what you are playing at all times and not just hit the root note.

So try to play in quarters as much as possible (four notes per measure). First note each root, the other notes from the Am pentatonic. If that gets too boring, you can increase to eighths (eight notes per measure) and the same principle.