Hey there, bass players! This lesson is going to help us spy one of the most essential tools in the musical arsenal, the major arpeggio. Chances are, you’ve been playing major arpeggios without even knowing it, especially if you’ve learned a 12-bar blues pattern or a handful of songs by the Beatles. Now we’ll put a face to the name, play through a few exercises to ingrain the concept, and identify arpeggios in their natural habitat.
A great way to think about an arpeggio is to relate it to a chord. A chord is a group of notes, played together, to create a certain sound. The most familiar version is a triad—a three-note chord. Instruments that are polyphonic, such as guitar or piano, can play multiple notes at one time, executing the chord as a whole. For instance, if a guitar player strums a G Major chord, they’ll play multiple strings at once with their fingers on the notes G, B, and D. We hear the notes ring out together and that creates the sound of a chord. Since the bass is quite the monophonic instrument, our job is to outline the chord, or play the notes individually. When we do this, we are playing an arpeggio.