 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with MusicTeacher.com and in this video we're going to be talking about how you guys can use arpeggios to make your chord progressions a little bit more interesting. All the tones you're hearing in this video today are coming from my PRSS 2 studio which is plugged into the Blackstar Silverline Deluxe. Many guitar players associate arpeggios with the technique of sweep picking which for many newer or intermediate players can seem quite a daunting prospect but arpeggios can also be used in rhythm guitar and they can be very interesting and great for spicing up existing chord progressions. If you've got a bunch of chords that you like the sound of but you just want a little bit more excitement from it, arpeggios could be the way to go. So an arpeggio essentially just means breaking up a chord into single notes so it doesn't necessarily mean sweep picking at 160 bpm. You can do arpeggios slowly as well and in this video we're going to tackle that. So we're going to be using a really simple chord progression I come up with which uses some simple chords. So it's an A minor, a C, a D minor, then we're going to be doing another C and I'm going to be switching then to this chord which just drops the lowest note of the C chord to this B note. The technical name for this chord is a C add nine slash B so it's just like a C but I've dropped the root note down a fret and I've removed the note on the D string. It's just a really nice transitional chord for the purpose of this exercise so you can apply these techniques to any chords you wish. These chords are just going to be used for the examples you're going to see today. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to play this progression with a couple of different styles of chord arpeggios so you guys can take some ideas from this and use them for your own playing. So here's the first one we're going to look at. So this first arpeggio is a very directional arpeggio. I'm going from the lowest note to the highest note and back again. So on the A minor chord that's actually starting from the A string I'm doing four beats down and then four beats back. Now when we're thinking in arpeggios we have to think rhythmically so for the purpose of this instead of using one note per beat I'm going to use two notes per beat giving me a full bar. So we've got one and two and which is my way up the chord which gets me to the B string then on the third beat I'm actually hitting the highest note and coming backwards so it's one and two and three and four and doing the same on the C chord. The only exception here is the D minor because I don't have five strings to play with I only have four so I'm going down which is taking me up to the start of the third beat one and two and and then up from the same note then on the final it'll run with the C and the C add nine slash B I'm just playing this down but this is a very directional style of arpeggio I'm always going from low to high or high to low. Another style of arpeggio you could use would be to start with the lowest note and then skip up to a high note and work backwards so something like this so what I'm doing here is I'm playing the lowest note on the first beat then I'm skipping to the B string and working backwards and two and and then on the third beat exactly the same thing now because I'm only playing four strings here this works for every single chord so we've got A minor to C to D minor and then my little run down then from C to the C add nine slash B that arpeggio is interesting because it's less linear than just going from low to high or high to low it actually breaks it up with that nice jump at the start the third arpeggio we're going to use is a slightly busy one and it goes like this so this one has some string skipping in so the picking pattern here is the lowest note of the chord down to the G so that's on the first beat then the second beat is the D string and the B string so I've got this string skipping thing going on exactly the same for the C chord same for the D chord but we move everything down a string and then it's the same for the little run down at the end that one requires a little bit more picking accuracy so you may find that one a little clumsy if you're just getting started with arpeggios but persevere in that one we'll clean up in no time the fourth and final one we're going to look at it's a little bit more complex so here it is in full and then we'll break it down so this pattern has a lot more going on in there in the A minor chord I'm starting from the A note and on the first two beats I'm picking the A D G D and on the third and fourth beats I'm skipping to the high E so there's these two different directional arpeggios there's one that goes low up and then we skip to high backwards and I'm doing the same thing on the C chord so the string picking pattern you're using here is A D G D E B G B this obviously changes when we get to the D minor chord because once again we don't have five strings so here I'm starting on the D I'm doing D G B G and then E B G B just to make this a little more interesting I also changed the arpeggio pan on the final rundown so on that C to C add 9 B we're playing A D B G so this shows how different rhythmic arpeggios can make a progression interesting if you change the rhythm on different chords so there you go there are some chordal arpeggio ideas that you guys can use to spice up your rhythm playing and your existing chord progressions so you can take these arpeggios adapt them use them in your own playing and see how they improve your chords that you're already playing because you may have a couple of chords that you've strung together that you're a little tired of the sound of this is a great way to unlock that and also use these principles and use these ideas to come up with your own rhythmic arpeggio patterns as well let us know down below in the comments how you've gotten on with this and if there are any other techniques you'd like to see us break down in these videos throw those below as well don't forget to check out black star amplification on youtube for more free video lessons just like this one and if you're looking for a music teacher in your local area please head to musicteacher.com check out the database of teachers all around the country waiting to help you guys out thanks much for watching and i'll see you soon