If You Know The Minor Pentatonic – You Already Know The Min7 Arpeggio
The easiest arpeggio shapes to learn are the min7. This is because they are almost identical to the Minor Pentatonic scale shapes, which you already know.
As you practice the five shapes, look for connections between the chord – minor pentatonic – arpeggio. Only the 4th is missing.
All arpeggio shapes must be learned just like you learned the barre chords, the pentatonic scales, and the modes. You must start slowly and work your way through all the shapes and keys using the cycle of 4th.
Start with the Am7 arpeggios as demonstrated in the playlist above. When you can play these, move on to playing them all as Dm7 arpeggios.
To completely nail the min7 arpeggio shapes, continue through the cycle. So after Am7 and Dm7, continue with Gm7, Cm7, Fm7 etc. Do this one shape at a time and expect it to take many days of regular practice before you find it easy.
Here’s an example of what taking the Em-shaped min7 arpeggio through the cycle of 4th looks like in TAB.
It’s important to understand that reading this TAB won’t make you great at playing this arpeggio, instead, you should be looking at the fretboard or even better, close your eyes!
When you can play all five shapes in all twelve keys, you have reached your goal and should move on to the next step, playing the maj7 arpeggios.
Min7 Arpeggios Guitar Lessons | Related Pages
Arpeggios | Step-by-step guitar course
There are only four CAGED arpeggio shapes to learn on the guitar, the min7, the maj7, the dom7, and the min7b5.
In the step-by-step arpeggio course, we master all these arpeggios in all CAGED shapes, an essential skill to acquire if you want to improvise.
Minor Pentatonic | Minor Scales
This is where it all starts. You must learn all five positions of the Minor Pentatonic. Without this, the guitar will never make sense.
Use the video lessons demonstrating this in the key of Am, you can move on once you have practised in all other keys as well.
Guitar Chords
With traditional music theory, the stave, and a piano, you’ll get easy-to-understand chords but they will not help if you want to play chords on the guitar.
Instead, on the guitar we use chord shapes derived from the five open-position chords, C, A, G, E, and D, hence CAGED.
Extend barre chords
Let’s extend all CAGED barre chords to min7, maj7, dom7, and the awkward min7b5. These are all easy to play!
Following the introduction video, you get individual videos demonstrating how to play this, moving through all CAGED chord shapes.
Chordacus
Spytunes chords, scale, and arpeggio software, Chordacus is a refined version of the so-called CAGED system.
Now available as both a chromatic (original version) and “within a key”, developed with the help of a Spytunes student.
About me | Dan Lundholm
This was a guitar lesson about min7 arpeggios, by Dan Lundholm. Discover more about him and learn guitar with Spytunes.
Most importantly, find out why you should learn guitar through playing tunes, not practising scales, and studying theory in isolation.