C Shape Arpeggios

Here is our first shape, the Major C Shape.

Can you see how the open C chord fits into this?

All the notes we are playing here, are notes that fit into a Major Triad. We've simply used octaves to increase the amount of options we have.

So, if we'd like to play along with an A major chord, we simply make sure we play this arpeggio with A as our root note, and all the other notes of the shape will fall into line.

Notice that the root note is not the lowest note of the shape!

Now, we have the minor shape.

As you know, the difference between the Major and Minor Triads lies entirely in whether we have a Major or Minor 3rd.

So, for the Minor C shape, all we've had to do is flat each 3rd from the Major shape.

This shape can be a bit of a stretch! But you can do it.

Lastly, let's look at a slightly more complicated one.

Here we have the Dominant 7th C Shape Arpeggio.

There are more notes in this shape than the previous two, since we're dealing with a Tetrad now. We've got our root note, Major 3rd, Perfect 5th, and a Minor 7th.

Playing through this, you will hear that distinctive Dom7 sound. You can really make that feeling stand out by playing this arpeggio over a Dominant 7th chord.