Major Lead 05 - Play A Guitar Solo Using Chord Arpeggios

Welcome to another lesson from my lead guitar course where we're looking at how to solo using the major scale and over major scale backing tracks. Now in this lesson we're gonna keep things very simple and look at how to solo and improvise using arpeggios. Now all an arpeggio is is single notes played from a chord. So even if I just played a C chord, but I just played it one string at a time. That is an arpeggio and uh there are very similar words, arpeggiated and things like that, but they all mean the same thing, they all mean single notes out of a chord. And what we can do to improvise a solo, um to give things a little bit of a different style rather than going for the sort of guitar Hero Shred kind of thing. Is um just play single notes out of whatever chord is being played and we're gonna look at exactly how to do that now, so let's get straight in for a close-up and this is the sort of thing you wanna be doing if you like the solos um by The Edge in many U2 songs such as. Where The Streets Have No Name, uh songs by The Eels, and any other very simple single note lead lines are a great inspiration. I'll be telling you some more ideas as we go through this lesson. Let's get in for a close up now, the tab is on the website, link is in the description. So here are two examples of how we can use this arpeggio idea to solo over a very simple chord sequence which would just be 2 strums of a C chord or 2 beats of a C chord to 2 beats of an F. So So if we were to solo over this, of course we could use the major scale, position one as we as we've looked at so far, but a great idea and concept that can make things so simple and really make things connect with the chords that are underneath it is this arpeggio idea. And what we need to use, um, in the fashion for the purposes of this course I should say, is the C bar cord. Which is the 8th fret of uh the thickest string, that's our C chord, and it's an 8 fret bar, essentially like sliding up the F bar code to 8 fret. But we can actually see that this is an E major shape if uh if we imagine the first finger's a capo. It's like an E major, and then what we're going to do to play the F is play the A shape, so you can see this sort of looks like an A major if the first finger was a capo. And that chord sequence. F FF becomes this. Now even if you can't yet play barcodes yet, you can still do this method because all we're going to do is play the thinner three strings. The thinner 3 strings, uh, we can see the thinnest two are like cheese wire and these other ones are wound. But uh these thinner 3 strings are where most melodies are played when we want to hear them above the chords. The chords tend to be lower and a melody tends to be, tends to be above them, that tends to be how melodies work. Um, so we want to stay on the thinnest 3 strings most of the time, and if we play this C bar chord again. The only notes we're playing on the thinnest 3 strings are 8 frets on the thinnest two strings, so we can just bar the thinnest two strings there. And then the middle finger more on the tip like this at 9th fret. And that's where the last dot is before my double dot on my guitar. And if we were to play an arpeggio of those, the simplest way to play it would be to pick string 3. So string 3212. And my example of arpeggios is usually everybody hurts, where we'd just be, uh, the first example I showed people, where we'd just be picking string 4321, and then back so that it fits the cords underneath this. We're going to go. 3213, and you can even do all of those with a down pick. Now because after those 44 notes, 1 and 2, and by beat 3, we've actually gone to the F chord, we need to play the thinnest 3 strings out of this F bar chord. Out of this one, which would be the first finger can stay kind of still, but it should really only play the thinnest string. But then we need a couple of fingers, and it's your choice which, you could do it here or like this, it depends what what you're gonna be playing. But the simplest way to do it is probably, uh, probably this way. So it's literally. Littlest finger and the 3rd finger where they would normally be on this A-shaped bar chord, thinnest finger only playing string one. And then our little lead line. Would sound like this. Which fits very nicely over that simple forward sequence of the scene. have. OK? Now, um, if there was another chord in there, say like if we went to the A minor or D minor or another chord in the key of C, um, a lot of the time if you stay on the C one, a lot of those same notes are actually the same as in the chord. We have a lot of notes in C. That are also in A minor, so if in doubt, go back to the C cos it's, it's the chord, it's the uh one chord of the song, it's the key of the song. So playing C will often sound pretty good if you're really unsure of this idea. But what you can do is just follow whatever chord's playing, so just play a higher arpeggio, work out what that bar chord is, so your A minor chord would be down at 5th fret, and it would be a minor chord. So you could just play. Over that A minor, for example, and as soon as you've got used to this idea, you will get, you know, you, you will see, hopefully you'll grasp that concept when you're more used to this improvising idea when you have more experience. I'm just making you aware that with this arpeggios idea, we're usually playing the same chord higher up the neck. As is in the the open chords underneath or whatever chord is underneath your song. I just wanted to show you another example of this, so example one just to recap, was 2341. And then we change to this F chord like this. No middle finger down, it's just there, uh 10th fret and 8th fret. And And I would probably keep my first finger bar in all the time if they were the only two chords. Um, but in example two, we just shake things up a little so we're not going in each, um, in just in strings order. Um, this time we're going to go, we're gonna still bar and we're gonna still do this shape, but we're going to go. 234. And again, I'm trying to communicate that you can change the rhythm and you can change which strings you pick anytime you want, because the chord, the notes that you're playing are always correct so long as they match the chord underneath, and we're still doing the C to an F. Even though I only pick string 3. String one 3, and then I change, uh actually I'm just changing essentially to the C 4 here. This is very much taking inspiration from the sort of lead lines that the Edge would do with a lot of delay and all that kind of thing, uh, where the streets have no name and that kind of idea. And the, the eels also, a lot of classic eels lead lines are like this. OK, so 9th fret, but we just keep this triad shape down, this C major triad. With a bar of that first finger, which can be tough for some people, you really want that thumb low to be able to do this. String one. String 3, 3rd finger goes down. String 1 and 2 this time, and each bar is just the same. The idea is you would do this in a loop, keep the picking the same, and no matter what chord you were playing, you would change to to that chord in the triad. If I change to an A minor chord. Or whatever chords you, you happen to be playing, but just this arpeggio example, it's just an example one more time, 34. That's Arpeggio example 2.