Subject: All Hail the Mighty Arpeggio!
You are getting this e-mail because you subscribed to it on www.learn-to-play-rock-guitar.com. If you don't want to receive these e-mails any longer, go to the bottom of this message and click on "unsubscribe." Hey there Friend, This week I've spent a considerable amount of time focused on arpeggios. Between The Daily 5 Guitar Habit and my live students, arpeggios have been one of the central themes.Arpeggios can be a lot of fun because you can take literally any old chord progression and instantly spice it up with an interesting picking pattern. What gets really cool is when you begin taking normal chords and either adding a note to the chord or removing a note and playing an open string instead. We see this technique a lot in many songs. Arpeggios really allow you to be creative. Another aspect of arpeggios is that you don't necessarily need to maintain the same picking pattern throughout the song. In fact, if you're just goofing around you don't even need to remember a specific pattern - just play whatever sounds good to you. However, without instilling some discipline in playing arpeggio patterns, you could stumble across a really cool riff then forget it, potentially losing it forever. This unfortunate result gets back to my message from last week about practice and focused effort to work towards mastery of guitar (or anything you want to get good at). While you can pretty much wing arpeggios and still have them sound good, they really give us an opportunity to focus on a number of disciplines in guitar mastery. All of the following performance aspects are critical to stepping up your guitar game:
Timing Timing is your ability to stay with the beat of the music you are playing. It's tied directly to rhythm in that you are following an established tempo (speed) and time (how many beats per measure and how long each beat lasts). But timing isn't rhythm - timing is your pick hitting the string at the exact time it is supposed to. Humans are not precise machines. Every one of us has a sloppy side, regardless of how we present ourselves. That sloppiness comes from inexperience. When you pick up guitar for the first time and begin realizing the complexity of the instrument, every aspect of playing is new. You need to develop countless new skills, many of which at the same time. As a result, your first attempt at playing along perfectly with a beat can be a little discouraging. Because we aren't machines, we might anticipate the beat coming and play before it, or we struggle to keep up and play the note behind the beat. This is normal and correctable through disciplined practice. Timing has a direct influence on feel, too. Music is not a static medium - we don't necessarily want to play directly on the beat. Sometimes the music calls for playing somewhere between two beats. For example, if the rhythm is a swing beat, you need to understand the difference and be able to match your playing to that style. In other words you need to adjust your timing to match the feel of that style. You might think of this as groove. When you play arpeggios, you will need to make sure you are playing in time to to the beat and the feel of the song. For example, listen to "House of The Rising Sun" by the Animals. The arpeggio pattern in the intro and verse has a distinct feel you can't get by picking each note in straight time. You really have to internalize the groove they created to play the song well. You can improve your timing by practicing specific arpeggio patterns until they become second nature. You build your muscle memory through this type of practice. Like many things guitar, the better you become at arpeggios, the easier more complex patterns are to learn. Rhythm Arpeggios are really good for practicing rhythm as you can set a tempo and play straight quarter notes to fine tune playing on the beat. Then we can use the same tempo to double up the picking to ensure the eighth notes are evenly spaced between each beat. But music is almost never straight quarter or eighth notes - as you arpeggiate a chord you might need one note to be held for two beats before plucking the next note in the chord. A good sense of rhythm is obviously incredibly important (read: critical!), so any tool you can use to help you understand it better should be welcome in your arsenal. Arpeggios can help a great deal with a structured pattern so you can use the practice session as a way to focus on your picking hand rather than the fingering on the neck. Articulation Articulation is how you you play each note. Sometimes you want to put emphasis on a particular note in a riff, or you want to transition between notes smoothly versus having each one being a definite picked note. For example, you might want to play a note louder or softer than the surrounding notes. You can use arpeggios to practice playing individual or multiple notes with different articulations. You can see an excellent display of different articulation techniques here with Joe Satriani playing "Always With You, Always With Me." The arpeggiated progression that starts this song and runs throughout demonstrates a plucked sort of articulation versus what you might see in sweep-picked arpeggios (around 2:35 into video), which would sound very smooth when done properly. Control Control is developed through practicing specific techniques until you can play something using that technique perfectly. Arpeggios give us an established pattern to follow as we practice that allows us to focus on the technique we're practicing rather than the chord or the notes. We can pinpoint rhythmic glitches in our playing and slow the tempo down to correct problems. We can use arpeggios to practice control over articulation so we can learn to be more expressive in our playing. Be diligent in focusing on specific problems you want to correct when you practice. Don't worry about the speed of your practice - worry about the accuracy. You can get a lot of attention with flash and speed in your playing, but without a solid foundation in timing, rhythm and control, accuracy will be lacking and your playing will fall apart. Arpeggios give us a great tool to improve key fundamentals in our technique that can make the difference between being an amateur player and potentially becoming a pro. And they sound cool! Peace~ Dave Dave "Eddie" Vance is a rock guitar enthusiast and gear nut. He has been playing guitar for over 30 years and enjoys tormenting the neighbors every chance he gets. When he's not slaving for the man, you can find him rocking out with his B.C. Rich Bich guitar, a cold beer and some sweet tunes. He also runs Learn-To-Play-Rock-Guitar.com, but you knew that already! Follow Learn To Play Rock Guitar:I welcome your feedback! Did you like today's message? What other topics would you like to see covered in my e-mails? Please let me know at: dave@learn-to-play-rock-guitar.com As always, please feel free to forward this email to a friend! I review products before recommending them. If you buy a product based on my recommendation, I will receive a commission. However, my emails also contain links that don’t require any investment on your part and are jam-packed with "juicy, guitar learnin' tastiness". We don't rent or share your name with anybody. Feel free to forward this issue to any friends you think would enjoy its contents. They will thank you. So will I.
|
