In this lesson, we’re going to focus on two things.
...
First, we’re going to learn the C major triad on our guitar (there
In this lesson, we’re going to focus on two things.
First, we’re going to learn the C major triad on our guitar (there are several different forms and variations of it) and both succeeding inversions.
You might already know how to play all this. If you do, feel free to skip ahead to the tab sheets or keep reading for a little review.
Second, we’re going to use those triads to come up with a few original, melodic arpeggios, as the title would suggest.
So our path will look like this:
Theory - Practice - Application
We’ll learn the theoretical concept, practice what is concrete and then apply it to do a little jamming of our own. Let’s begin by defining a triad.
What is a triad?
Simply put, a triad is a set of three notes that are stacked in thirds (third intervals). Therefore a triad will have the following three components:
1. Root Note
2. Third Scale Degree Note
3. Fifth Scale Degree Note
This is one of the most important building blocks a guitar player has at his/her disposal.
Since we’re focusing on C major, those notes will be derived from the major scale, which is made up of the following notes:
This means our root note is C, and we’ll take the third and fifth degree of the C major scale, which simply means we take the third and fifth notes in that sequence.
That leaves us with the following three notes for our triad: C - E - G
We can now tab this out:
As you can see we’ve tabbed C, E and G in a short arpeggio. This is called our triad’s root position.
It’s