Blues Arpeggios Get More Melodic!

Inject some creative arpeggio ideas into your blues solos to really supercharge your playing. In this feature Andy Saphir shows you how.

In this feature we’re going to be looking at a great way of broadening the melodic scope of our blues playing by creatively using three-note (or triad) arpeggios to produce tonal colours that give a different sound and feel to the Major and Minor Pentatonic approaches characteristically heard as the basis for blues soloing.

Naturally, there is of course nothing wrong with using those Pentatonic sounds, and indeed, in order to sound ‘bluesy’, we need to keep those flavours in our solos, but with some carefully considered mixing of these two different approaches, we can develop a significantly more sophisticated and melodic dimension to our playing. Players like the legendary Larry Carlton use triad based arpeggios to wonderful effect and so this approach is ideal for the player who wants to extend their tonal vocabulary and achieve interesting and impressive melodic sounds.