Enough talk about shapes and such! You're ready to apply this to music. Let's invent a chord progression using simple open-position chords to play arpeggios over. Let's use this simple chord progression in the key of C Major: C Major, A minor, F Major, G Major, E minor, D minor, C Major. Play through that cycle of chords and get the sound in your head. To make an arpeggio solo, all we have to do is move the shapes we learned earlier to the correct roots. For the example in FIGURE 9-17, use only shapes with roots on the fifth strings.

It's amazing what you can do with these shapes, and they sound so good! FIGURE 9-18 shows another example utilizing just two chords, A minor and B-diminished seventh.

As you can see from these two examples, making your own fingerings isn't that difficult, but it does mean that you have to know what chords you're playing over. Until you have a lot of experience, you probably won't be whipping these out on the spur of the moment; many of your arpeggio solos will be planned, and that's just fine! There's nothing wrong with working things out in advance; you have to crawl before you walk.

Other Arpeggios

Since an arpeggio is nothing more than a chord frozen, do you have to limit your arpeggio options to just simple triads? Of course not! Some of the most beautiful chords on the guitar have extra notes on them. FIGURE 9-19 is a great chord progression using added-ninth chords.

How would you create an arpeggio pattern for C Major added ninth and A minor added ninth? Simple: figure out what the extra note is and fit it into your arpeggio shape. For C Major, the ninth is D. Add that into your arpeggio shape, and you come up with FIGURE 9-20.

For the A-minor ninth chord, the ninth is B. You can also add that into the shape to come up with FIGURE 9-21.

You can combine these shapes into a run and come up with a very cool lick. Again, a little brainpower goes a long way here. See FIGURE 9-22.