6 Types of Easy 3 Note Arpeggios That You Need To Know

You should always try to learn new melodies that you can use in your solos. And in Jazz, Arpeggios are a great place to start.

In this video I will go over 6 different types of 3-Note Arpeggios which are really useful because they are 3 notes, so they are easy to study and also very easy to use in solos giving you a lot of material that you can use when improvising over a song.

What a lot of people miss is that an arpeggio is really just a short melody. We think about what the notes are and what alterations and extensions it is over the chord, but you often forget to listen to it and just realize that knowing this arpeggio is really knowing a very strong melody that you can use in your solos.

If you play jazz and especially more modern jazz then knowing these structures is really something you need as a part of your vocabulary and you will find it everywhere in the playing of people like Kurt Rosenwinkel, Jonathan Kreisberg and Lage Lund.

The way I made this video is that I played a short solo on minor blues that I will take apart and talk about all the different arpeggios, give you some exercises and ideas on how to use it.

Content:

0:00 Intro - Arpeggios are Melodies!
0:52 The Minor Blues Example
1:42 Phrase #1 The Essential Triads
2:25 A few thoughs on Triads and Finding Triads for a chord
2:50 Practicing Triads and Inversions
3:26 Phrase #2 Quartal Arpeggios and Altered Dominants
5:11 How To Practice Quartal Arpeggios
5:51 Phrase #3 Shell-Voicings
6:43 Break up the groove with 4-note groupings
7:24 Exercise for Shell-voicings
7:42 Phrase #4 Quintal Arpeggios and Sus4 Triads
8:17 Sus4 Triads
8:37 Quinatal Arpeggios Exercise / Message in a Bottle
9:04 Sus4 Triads on a 2-string set
9:40 The Two "Weird" Sus4 Triads (That Joe Henderson Knew)
10:25 Phrase #5 - Spread Triads
11:05 What are Spread Triads or Open-Voiced Triads
12:09 Technical exercises with Spread Triads
12:51 Phrase #6 - The Major b5 Triad (That you didn't know you knew)
14:37 Move the b5 triads through the scale (as a 1 3 4 structure)
14:55 Thoughts on moving Interval Structures Through a Scale
16:02 Like the Video? Check out my Patreon Page!

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[JensLarsen]

Did I leave out one and Do you use all of these? 🙂

[captainkoo]

Jazz is complicated and beautiful. Thanks for making it easier to understand.

[xZereZx]

I really liked the structure in this lesson. Teaching a different arpeggio concept on each chord was a great choice.

[jazzman]

Wow such great ideas clearly explained and useable right away + lots to work on for integrating into my playing. Thanks Jens!!

[eternalrainbow-cjiu]

Dear Jens, thank you for the sus4 on the Dim! I practiced it in all scales, than I found an amazing discovery: to Triads are hidden in them(of course you know this, also one of the main teachings of barry HarrisI was trying to put your patern in to practice on have you met miss Jones, the 2nd bar, so I tried to re-analyse it but know your lick just seen in the light of two Triads, I guess it easier two see them in four different triads, of all the possible ones inthe Dim Realm, the nicest thing is the recognition of the #9-3 the typical dominants of the half hole scale(octatonic) real nice...
The main things is that we have more possibilities, both two Triads work Great, they give more the Dominant sound (when played with purely the tone of the triads, when we add the other two we get more the Dim sound both nice!

[TubeBJYou]

James Larsen, you are awesome !!! Amazing Vídeo !!! Thank's a lot !!!

[ChuloDavidcito]

Oh, Jens! These big Italian words! I'm from a mono-lingual country?! Seriously, great lesson, I use bits of all of these but this is way more comprehensive, dank! I like to use sweeps and hybrid picking for some, although you're right, alternate tends to sound better. I see that I've done view #666 of this video. I wonder if that makes the arps satanic at all?

[eternalrainbow-cjiu]

Of course I think you mean with sus4 on F#dim F# A B 2: A C D 3 C Eb F 4 F# A B thos could be seen as BTriad D F & Ab if I play the lick as follows, I get 8 different chords: 1F# A B(B7N3) 2G# B-C(Ab10)3A C D(D7) 4B-D-D#(of course B7b10 etc Did you mean that this way??

[nhklog]

Is this available at your webstore ? Thnx

[dr]

That was a really nice solo and teaching example! On you analysis, however, why are you referring to those trichords as “maj flat 5”? (0, 2, 6) in normal form. Whole tone sonorities which could imply a French aug6 chord, or incomplete inverted dominant structures, depending on use, if you want to keep it in tertian terms. But things don’t always need to be stuck into a tertian nomenclature

[SmetadAnarkist]

Is a triad always a 1-3-5? Or could I change the 5 to a 7 for example?