What use are Arpeggios?

Hi there,

I have books on guitar which advocate learning arpeggios. Why?

Playing them alone sounds boring. What use are they?

I use them to balance out tables that wobble.

But seriously, arpeggios (or broken chords what ever you want to call them) are just another device used to give a song a certain feel. Use them or not. However take this scenario:

You have to guys on acoustic guitars. If they both were doing the exact same strum pattern, the song would sound pretty good. But if one person would take over the struming and the other do some arpeggios, that would add some character.

Well, if you listen to any guitar solo - and I mean literally, any guitar solo, you'll hear three types of things happening:

1. Big jumps from one note to the next (as in C-B)
2. Scale tone runs from one note to the next (as in C-D-E-F-G-A-B)
3. Runs of 'skips' from one note to the next (as in C-E-G-B)

Those runs of skips are arpeggios. In any decent sounding solo, all three types of movement happen, and the scale and arpeggio runs happen more than the leaps.

If you think about it, they don't have to be boring. Think of the Am pentatonic scale - you can probably fly around that thing in solos, right? Well... the notes are A-C-D-E-G - and that happens to be the arpeggio for Am9 (A-C-E-G-D).

Play around with them, just as you do with scales. See what you can do with them. Oh, and the value of practicing them as written in the excercise books is twofold: you learn what notes are in what arpeggios, and your fingers get used to going from one note to the next in that series. Just think of it as paying your dues :)