Arpeggios

It is easy to forget how important arpeggios can be in improvisation. These small melodic units will really help outline the harmony and chord progressions in a song making your solos sound more composed and thought out. Arpeggios should always be part of your improvisations if you want to sound more melodic and professional.

All arpeggios come from scales and the chords they produce. You can use a Cmaj7 arpeggio over a Cmaj chord to really outline the sound. Try to find some of these arpeggios within the basic scales. For example the C major scale contains the following arpeggios

Cmaj triad, Cmaj7, Dm triad, Em triad, Am triad, Fmaj triad, B diminished, Gmaj triad, Fmaj7, Am7, Bm7b5, Em7 etc

You can mix these together to make some really melodic passages. One advantage of using arpeggios is that you automatically start using wider intervals and chord tones forcing you to break away from merely playing up and down the scales. Arpeggios are you best friend when it comes to jazz playing as it is often to confusing to play over chord changes with a scalar approach.

Arpeggio substitution

So far we have talked about playing the arpeggio over its relative chord. For example playing a Cmaj7 arpeggio over a Cmaj7 chord. We can create some much more interesting sounds by playing different arpeggios over other chords from within the scale. A good example would be playing an Em7 arpeggio over a Cmaj7 chord. This gives us a Cmaj9 sound as the Em7 arpeggio contains the third, fifth, seventh and ninth notes of a Cmaj chord.

You can really get some interesting sounds using this technique. Another common example would be using a relative major arpeggio over a minor chord. An example of this would be playing a Cmaj7 arpeggio over an Am7 chord giving us an Am9 sound. This is becuse the Cmaj7 arpeggio contains the minor third, fifth, minor seventh and ninth note of an Am chord.

All these arpeggios can be played in any order. Try using different sequences to really get the sounds underneath your fingers. For example try playing the Major 7 arpeggio 1,5,3,7 etc. Come up with your own patterns. Experiment with this technique and see how far you can take it

The table below provides a quick overview of all the main arpeggios and how they are constructed.

Arpeggio	Intervals
Major triad	1, 3, 5
Minor triad	1, b3, 5
Major 7	1, 3, 5, 7
Minor 7	1, b3, 5, b7
Dominant 7	1, 3, 5, b7
Minor 7b5	1, b3, b5, b7
Diminished 7	1, b3, b5, 6
Augmented	1, 3, #5

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