Hey Friend,

For some reason I woke up feeling like today is Friday… man, what a letdown!

We’ve covered a lot of chords and their forms and voicings. You’ve gotten lots of chord charts and instruction on how these have been constructed. 

What we haven’t done a lot of, though, is apply what we’ve learned.

Yes, you’ve worked through exercises that primarily focused on hearing the chords strummed and in reference to other chords within their respective key. But there’s a lot more you can do with your chord knowledge.

One of the easiest ways to give more life to your chords is to “arpeggiate” them. An arpeggio is a chord that you play as individual notes instead of strumming all the strings at the same time.

You might also see arpeggios referred to as "broken chords,” since the chord is broken into a sequence of notes instead of played together.

It comes from one of those old Italian words - arpeggiare, which literally means “to play on a harp.” That makes sense, as you can’t easily play chords on a harp.

You hear arpeggios ALL the time, whether you knew it or not.

Oftentimes, what you think is a lead guitar playing over strummed chords is actually a second guitar playing chords as arpeggios. 

And what’s even cooler is, you don’t have to play the notes in sequential string order, meaning strings 6 through 1, or 1 through 6. You can mix up the note order without much effort to create some very interesting riffs. 

We’re going to dive into playing arpeggios and looking at lots of examples. 

I think this will help you get a much better feel on the importance and usefulness of chords in the guitar player’s life. You're going to like this!

See you tomorrow...

Peace~

Dave