Internalizing Arpeggios For Guitar - Introducing The 4 Finger Practice Technique

You may have noticed something. The guitar is a very complex instrument in terms of fingering possibilities. In fact, I remember reading in The Advancing Guitarist by Mick Goodrick that the average note on the guitar has 2.8 locations and 9.2 fingerings. I'm not sure exactly how he worked this out, but I can believe it.

What this complexity means is that it will take a LONG time to master all the possible fingerings of different musical materials such as scales, arpeggios and chords. I'm not being negative here, I'm just speaking the truth. I've been working on my fretboard knowledge for over 20 years...and sometimes I feel like I've only just begun my learning! :-)

And I gotta admit that the task can sometimes be a little bit overwhelming. Everytime I learn a new type of scale, chord or arpeggio there seems to be an endless number of fingerings that need to be internalized.

Maybe you can relate to this frustration?

If you can, then you're in luck! I've got a really helpful practice technique that I use...and I'd like to share it with you now...

Introducing The 4 Finger Practice Technique

To make the learning process easier, let's use a specific example to illustrate this practice technique. We'll apply this practice technique to E Dominant 7th arpeggios.

Wait a minute, let's take a step backwards for a second. Just in case you don't know, dominant 7th arpeggios use the following scale degrees...

Dominant 7th = 1 3 5 b7

So to find out the notes of an E Dominant 7th arpeggio, we would do the following steps...

Step One:

Write out the notes of the E Major scale. This would give us the following...

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
E	F#	G#	A	B	C#	D#

 Step Two:

Write down the 1 3 5 and 7 from the E Major scale. This would give us...

1	3	5	7
E	G#	B	D#

Step Three:

Flatten the 7. In other words, lower the 7 (D#) by one semi-tone. Doing this gives us this...

1	3	5	b7
E	G#	B	D

These notes form an E Dominant 7th arpeggio.

All clear so far? Awesome!

Let's now put The 4 Finger Practice Technique into practice. Please check out the following fretboard diagrams. They show four different ways of fingering an E Dominant 7th arpeggio...

E Dominant 7th: 1st Finger start

E Dominant 7th: 2nd Finger start

E Dominant 7th: 3rd Finger start

E Dominant 7th: 4th Finger start

Take a few minutes now to look at the diagrams. I recommend grabbing your guitar and playing through the arpeggio fingerings. What do you notice about them?

Here are a few things that you might have noticed...

• The lowest note of each arpeggio is the E note located at the 14th fret on the D-string.
• Each arpeggio fingering starts from a different finger.
• I have built an arpeggio fingering from all four fingers of the fretting-hand. (This is why it's called The 4 Finger Practice Technique).

Put Your Thinking Cap On For A Second

It's a very simple practice technique. All it involves is making up and memorizing four fingerings starting from each finger of your fretting-hand. But despite its simplicity, it is VERY powerful. Think about these questions for a few minutes...

• In what ways will this practice strategy help develop your technique?
• How will it help you develop your overall fretboard knowledge?
• How will it help improve your improvisational skills?
• How will it help develop your creativity?
• How can you adapt this practice technique to the musical materials that you need to master?
• What would happen if you took stuff you already know, and used this practice technique to create new ways of playing that stuff?

I'm sure that the more you think about this practice technique, the more you'll realize that it can help you alot. It's certainly helped me over the years!

Final Words

That's all for now. Please make sure that you do the following before the next lesson...

1. Memorize and learn to play the four E Dominant 7th fingerings we covered in this lesson.
2. Make up four fingerings for each of the following different arpeggios...
3. • E Major Seventh (1 3 5 7)
   • E Minor Seventh (1 b3 5 b7)
   • E Minor Seventh Flat 5 (1 b3 b5 b7)
4. Make up four new fingerings for an E Dominant Seventh arpeggio. But this time make the lowest note of each arpeggio the E Note at the 7th fret on the A-String.

Practice hard, and I'll look forward to seeing you soon!

All the best,

Craig Bassett.
P.S. Don't panic if you get stuck with this homework. I'll be giving you the answers in the next lesson. :-)