Five Approaches For Making Guitar Arpeggios Sound Incredible (Even If You Can’t Play Fast Yet)

You can transform any guitar arpeggio from boring to awesome without playing it super fast. To do it, you just need to use creative exercises that make the pattern sound musically expressive.

1. Add A Break Into Your Arpeggio

If you simply repeat the same arpeggio up and down over and over it will eventually become boring. Rather than doing this, break each ascending and descending section into separate licks.

2. Expand And Harmonize Your Arpeggios Using Inversions

You can continually repeat an arpeggio over and over without it becoming old by doing the following:

– Lengthen the pattern using its inversions

– Use inversions as a way to harmonize the notes in your arpeggio

You must have great fretboard visualization skills to be able to expand an arpeggio using its inversions. Choose any arpeggio and attempt to locate its notes across the entire fretboard (for example, find the notes A C E for an A minor).

In order to add harmony to an inversion, you must record the inversions separately above one another (to do this the inversions can be played in any order).

Harmonizing different arpeggios makes this concept sound even more interesting (as you can hear in the video).

3. Use A Varying Amount OF String In Your Arpeggio Shapes

Use a combination of 2, 3, 4 etc. string arpeggio shapes while playing arpeggio licks. This gives your guitar playing more variety and adds additional texture to the music.

Use the following three step exercise:

Step One: Think of several different arpeggio patterns to play one after the other. For instance:

B minor

D# major

F# major

G major

Step Two: Play each pattern using a varied number of strings as well as a new inversion each time you switch arpeggios. For instance:

B minor root position (4 string pattern)

D# major root position (6 string pattern)

F# major 1st inversion (3 string pattern)

G major 2nd inversion (4 string pattern)

Step Three: Think of ten variations of the arpeggios you came up with and play each variation with a different number of string lengths, plus new kinds of inversions.

4. Create Excitement By Inserting Silence Into Your Arpeggios

Place silence into an arpeggio at unexpected times to make it sound more interesting.

Alter where you use silence and the length of time you use it for. Don’t stop at the same point every single time. This is crucial for keeping your arpeggio pattern from becoming boring.

5. Integrate These Ideas Together

You’ve got to play arpeggios with a lot of variety in order to keep them interesting. Even the coolest ideas can sound boring if you play them too much. Create variations of an arpeggio and utilize the ideas explained in this article.