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

The following video will help you play awesome arpeggio guitar licks:

https://youtu.be/A8ww2G0GMrY

These ideas will transform your arpeggios into creative, engaging musical expressions:

1. Insert A Break Into The Arpeggio’s Pattern

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.

See how this sounds by watching the video at 33 seconds.

Don’t just use one of these variations, make sure to use both. If you overuse either one, it can become boring quickly.

This free sweep picking resource gives you new ideas for how to use arpeggios creatively.

1. Use Different Numbers Of Strings In Your Arpeggios

Don’t play 3 note per strings over and over. Use a mix of 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 string patterns. This will add more variety to your guitar playing while adding more texture to your arpeggios.

Use the following three step exercise:

Step One: Come up with various different arpeggio patterns to play in a progression. For instance:

C minor

E flat major

G major

Ab major

Step Two: Use different sized string patterns plus new inversions each time you switch arpeggios. For instance:

C minor 2nd inversion (3 string pattern)

E flat major root position (4 string pattern)

G major root position (6 string pattern)

Ab major 1st inversion (5 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.

1. Generate Excitement By Inserting Silence Into Your Arpeggios

Inserting silence into an arpeggio at various points adds tension and generates excitement for the listener.

This makes the arpeggio easier to play and also makes it sound more awesome.

This video about sweep picking shows how cool this sounds.

Change where you insert silence and how long it lasts. Stop to insert silence at different points. This is very important for keeping your sweep picking patterns sounding interesting.

1. Expand And Harmonize Your Arpeggios Using Inversions

You can maintain interest in your guitar arpeggios while repeating them over and over IF you do the following:

-Lengthen the pattern using its inversions

-Utilize inversions to harmonize the notes in the pattern

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).

Check out the video beginning at 1:52 to listen to a sample of this.

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

Study guitar with a teacher to discover how to get more creative results using this concept.

1. 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.

This free sweep picking resource shows you what you need to do to make any arpeggio sound totally badass.