Arpeggio – Chords Broken Up

Good morning! This is Duane, and we’ve been doing a series of videos on music theory, and we’ve titled the series “Good Stuff You Really Ought To Know About Music!” One thing you really ought to know about music are arpeggios. Arpeggio - the word came from playing the harp, because as you strum the harp or play the harp you’re usually playing one note at a time. So an arpeggio is a series of notes made out of a chord of some sort. The simplest kind of arpeggio would be to take a chord like that and break it up (playing piano). That’s an arpeggio.

If you took piano lessons, you probably did this at first (playing piano), and then you went up an octave, and then you went up two octaves, and connected the left hand to the right hand, and so on. And you did that and hit the key of D, D flat and D, D flat and so on, and you learned how to play broken chords. The definition of an arpeggio is simply that it’s a broken chord.

Now in practical usage, though, I don’t think that’s too useful. I mean, it’s just an exercise, but you can use it in actual playing. Let’s say you’re playing the song “Laura,” and it starts in the A minor 7th chord with the 9th being the melody, so I can arpeggiate that- instead of just playing the block chord- instead of doing that I can go (playing piano demonstration).

Whoops! sorry. Those are all arpeggios, okay. They’re broken chords, so I’m taking the A minor 7th chord with the 9th (playing piano), and then just rolling it up the keyboard two or three octaves. Sometimes I’ll come back down like that. It depends how much time I have. Then I go to something else like- these are block chords here. When the note is held for two or more beats, I have time to do that (playing piano).

That’s terrible; I haven’t played that song in years. It’s a beautiful song! If you don’t know it, you gotta look it up. It’s called “Laura.”

Anyway, you can do it with the right hand, you can do it with the left hand. One simple way to do it in the left hand is to take a three-note chord like this (playing piano), and instead of playing it all at once, to arpeggiate it like that, make an arpeggio out of it and keep your damper pedal down. If you’re kind of a beginner at the piano, I advocate doing that, because you can use that on a lot of accompaniment.

See, that keeps the song flowing (playing piano). If you take any chord and stretch it out, take the 3rd out of the middle and play the root, the 5th and the 3rd and just keep on doing that. Or you can play- after you hit the low root, then you can play the 5th and the 3rd and just alternate if you want. Lots of things you can do with arpeggios, but you definitely ought to know about them! That’s just one good thing you really ought to know about music!

If you enjoyed this series, come on over to play piano and sign up for our entire series.

Hope to see you there! Bye bye for now.

***For lots more good stuff on piano playing come on over to my website at https://www.playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips – “Exciting Piano Chords & Sizzling Chord Progressions!”

Here’s a great little book on chords and chord progressions on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Chords-Chord-Progressions-Exciting-ebook/dp/B0076OUGDE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404158669&sr=1-1&keywords=piano+chords+duane+shinn

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4OQkNsMpxs&feature=youtu.be

__________________________________________________________________