Jazz Guitar Arpeggio Finder

Arpeggios through a progression

One arpeggio per chord is the easy half. The useful half is seeing which notes two arpeggios in a row have in common — because those are the notes a line can hold while the chord changes underneath it, and holding one note through a chord change is worth more than any number of fast patterns.

The books behind this tool

An arpeggio is the set of notes that are safe. Tension and Resolution is about the ones that are not, and about when a line has earned the right to play them.

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Tension and Resolution

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Jazz Harmony

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The shapes, string by string

An arpeggio is not learnt as a position on the neck; it is learnt as three shapes, one for each string its root can sit on. That is how it is found again at speed — you do not count frets, you look at where the root is. Here is Em7 over Cmaj7, the 3rd-5th-7th-9th of the chord, in all three.

Solid dots are notes of the chord underneath; hollow dots are what the arpeggio adds to it. The number in each dot is the degree against Cmaj7, not against Em7 — because the chord is what you are playing over, and the only useful question while it goes past is which dot is its third.

Start with the seventh arpeggios

There are five that carry almost all of the repertoire: maj7, m7, 7, m7b5 and dim7. Between them they cover every chord in a major key and almost every chord in a minor one. A triad is not enough on its own, because a triad cannot tell a maj7 from a 6 from a dominant — the seventh is the note that decides, which is exactly why the shell voicing keeps it and drops the fifth.

Learn each of the five in the three shapes below — root on the 6th string, on the 5th, on the 4th — before adding a sixth arpeggio to the list. Five arpeggios in three positions in twelve keys is a large amount of playing and a small amount of memorising, and it is the whole foundation.

Over Cmaj7

Over Cm7

Over G7

Triads on top: the upper structures

The other direction is to go further out rather than one step up. An upper-structure triad is a plain three-note triad played over a chord it does not belong to, chosen so that every one of its three notes lands on a tension. Over G13, an A major triad gives the 9th, the #11th and the 13th. Over G7alt, a C# (D♭) major triad gives the #11, the b7 and the b9. Not one note of either is a note you learned as part of the chord, and every note of both belongs.

What makes the device work is that the shape is completely familiar and the sound is not. Your hand plays a major triad — the first thing anybody learns — and the listener hears an altered dominant. That gap between how easy it is to play and how far out it sounds is the reason upper structures have never gone out of fashion.

Over G7alt

Over G13

How the tool decides

Nothing here is a stored list of "arpeggios that work over C7". Every arpeggio in the database is built on all twelve roots and then tested against the chord you typed. Anything containing a note the chord symbol rules out is dropped outright — a natural 9 over a 7b9, a natural 5 over an altered dominant — and anything containing an avoid note, a note a semitone above a chord tone with no licence to be there, is dropped too. That is why F major never appears over Cmaj7 and Gm7 never appears over C7, however often you have seen them listed.

What survives is then ranked by how much of the chord it actually carries and by how often the pairing is really played, and the order is a ranking rather than a verdict. The list is deliberately mixed: the chord's own arpeggios get four places and no more, because eight spellings of the same chord is a correct answer to a question nobody asked. What you came for is the other shapes.

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