Ep. 12: Arpeggios

In this episode of The Harmonious Blacksmith, we dive deep into the world of arpeggios, a cornerstone concept in music theory that every music student, theorist, and music theory enthusiast should master. Whether you’re a beginner or an advanced musician, understanding the mechanics of arpeggios is crucial for improving your musical technique, improvisation skills, and overall musicianship.

We’ll break down what an arpeggio is, how it differs from basic chords, and the role it plays in creating movement and emotion in classical music, jazz, and contemporary compositions. From major and minor arpeggios to more complex patterns like diminished and augmented arpeggios, this episode covers it all. We also explore the importance of arpeggio fingerings, voicings, and progressions in both performance and composition.

If you're passionate about music theory, harmony, or just love exploring the inner workings of music, this episode will help you unlock the full potential of your arpeggio practice. Tune in for expert insights, helpful tips, and a deeper understanding of one of music’s most essential building blocks.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT OF THIS PODCAST AND MUSIC EDUCATION!
Sincerely, Kevin Patrick Fleming

#MusicTheory #MusicCommentary #MusicTheoryPodcast #MusicTheoryStudent #LearnMusicTheory

Chapters

• 0:00 Musical Introduction
• 0:56 Episode 12 Introduction
• 2:12 Main Topic : ARPEGGIOS
• 2:30 Definition : What is an ARPEGGIO?
• 5:43 Memorize your Triad Letters!
• 7:18 Scale Degree Equivalents
• 7:48 Audio Examples : Key Of C Major
• 10:24 Extended Harmony Arpeggios w/ Audio Examples
• 11:22 More Audio Examples of Arpeggios
• 11:29 'Lovelight'
• 13:13 Audio Example : 'The Star-Spangled Banner'
• 14:59 Melodic Arpeggios vs. Harmonic Arpeggios
• 16:29 'Asturias' - Isaac Albeniz - Arpeggio Breakdown
• 18:41 'Eine Kleine NachtMusik ' / Mozart - Arpeggio Breakdown
• 22:45 Audio Example : 'Pretty Woman' / Roy Orbison - Arpeggio Breakdown
• 25:08 Weekly Challenge : Can you recognize arpeggios?
• 26:53 Outro/Recap

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 0:56

was the Spanish piece Asturias by Isaac Albaniz, the great Spanish composer born in 1860 in Spain. He wrote this piece in the early 1890s, and it was actually originally written for piano. Back then, Spanish composers were on a really nationalistic flair in their composition. So even piano composers and even composers writing in Welcome back to The Harmonious Blacksmith, everybody. This is now season two, and this is episode two of season two, episode 12 overall. I am your host, Kevin Patrick Fleming. Oh, there they are. There's my peach. What up, peach? What up, peach? Let's go. I have a really fun episode today, and today's episode is going to be all about one of my favorite and most fun and creative concepts in music theory, arpeggios. So what is an arpeggio? An arpeggio is a melodic sequence of notes that come directly and only from triads and chords. So let's break that down a little bit. When we describe things as melodic, remember all the way back to my definition of melody in episode one of this podcast, which to paraphrase was basically that melodies are a sequence of notes played or sung sung one at a time that create a main tune or the main thematic material of music. But now that you guys have graduated far past episode one, it's okay for me to add the detail that when we describe something as melodic, it really doesn't mean it's always the main tune. We can have multiple melodies going on in music. There's even melodic bass lines where you have a bass line that takes over some main thematic material, even though it's not necessarily the main theme of the music. I just wanted to clear all that up. So when we talk about melodic going forward, we're really just talking about a string of notes connected together, played or sung one note at a time that creates some sort of tuneful sounding sequence. But when we refer to something in a piece of music as the melody, that's when we're referring to the main tune of a music so really it's a differentiation between saying something is melodic kind of describing it as melodic as opposed to saying in this tune this is the melody so i just wanted to make that distinction so there's no confusion going forward so now getting back to arpeggios arpeggios are in fact generally melodic gestures and like i said they come from triads and chords. And of course, where do triads and chords come from? Ding, ding, ding! They come from scales. Everything comes from scales. No matter how advanced I get in music theory concept, it is always going to be rooted in scales. And that is something that if you've been listening the whole time, you already know. So in order to understand fully how arpeggios work, we need to go back to our rules of diatonic scales. in order to understand where the arpeggios come from. So recall that diatonic scales go through every single letter of the music alphabet, never skip a letter, and they never repeat a letter. So you always get A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, et cetera, et cetera. And at some point, we turn that into scale degrees to create paradigms for keys, right? So that it can transcend keys, and we can just use the same numbers over and over again to represent the order of a scale. So I'm explaining all of this because you need to understand the following groupings in order to understand the patterns that arpeggios come under. And those groupings are that no matter what key you're in, no matter how many sharps, no follows. ACE, BDF, CEG, DFA, EGB, FAC, GBD, and back to ACE. In my very first semester as a freshman music performance major, our theory teacher made us rattle all of those off really quickly with no breath in between so that it was down pat and we had it locked away in our brain. I do recommend that you do the same. This is the kind of thing you could do when you're waiting in a line, when you have a TV in the background that you're watching, or just anything where you can do this. You need to be able to go A, C, E, B, D, F, C, E, G, D, F, A, E, G, B, F, A, C, G, B, D, A, C, E. You could have six sharps in your key as an F sharp major, for example. And guess what? Those triads are still going to be spelled exactly the same. There's just going to be a lot of sharps in there. you could have five flats in a key going the other way on the circle of fifths. And those triads are still going to be spelled exactly that way. They're just going to have flats on some of the letters. So now we can also turn that into scale degrees so that we can transcend keys a little bit easier. And that would sound as follows. So the following scale degrees will go together if you recall for an arpeggio or a triad or a chord. 1-3-5, 2-4-6, 3-5-7, 4-6-1, 5-7-2, 6-1-3, 7-2-4, and back to 1-3-5. Okay, so now let's have a little fun by putting all this knowledge into motion. And so what I'm going to do, I'm going to break down the key of C major, good old key of C major, on the guitar and explain and play arpeggios for you. So of course we're going to start with the C major scale on guitar, which sounds like this. And as we know, it would be spelled C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. Remember diatonic scales, they include every letter and they don't skip any. And then as we know, the triads that turn into the chords are based on the skipping principle. And our chords in the key of C major, as a reminder, are going to be the one chord is C major. Okay. Two chord is D minor. Three chord is E minor. Four chord is F major. Five chord is G major. Six chord is A minor. Seven chord is B diminished. And then we're back to C. And now for the arpeggios in the key of C major. We're going to start with that C major chord, which consists of one, three, and five. And that is your first arpeggio. And then D minor is going to be 2, 4, 6. E minor is going to be 3, 5, 7. F major is 4, 6, and 1. G major is 5, 7, and 2. A minor is going to be 6, 1, and 3. B diminished is going to be 7, 2, and 4. And then we're back to 1, 3, and 5. So when I string those arpeggios together, it sounds like this. And just to give you a glimpse on how far we can go with that, if you recall extended harmony and how it works, if you want a seventh chord or a ninth chord, for example, you take the three triad notes and then you just add extra thirds on top of it. So a seventh chord is going to have four pitches, a ninth chord is going to have five, et cetera, et cetera. And those are notes you can also use in the arpeggio. So let me give you an example. By starting with C major, we knew that one 1-3-5 is the original triadic arpeggio, but if we want a seventh chord, we would just add one more. And particularly, it's going to be the note that was already in the key. Okay, so in this case, it's a B. So my C arpeggio would be C, E, G, and then a B on top, which makes it a major seventh chord. And if I wanted a ninth, I could keep going and add one more. C, E, G, B, D. Okay. and so on and so forth. So I could go all the way up to a 13th. So I could go C, E, G, B, D, F, and then up to A, And there's no such thing as the 15th because you're back to the root note and everything repeats again. All right. So now let's get into the fun stuff, which is the musical examples. I'm going to start with the simplest one I could think of that goes way back, way back into the mid 20th century. And it was a tune I always loved hearing by the Grateful Dead. Yep. I'm an old deadhead. It's revealed. But this one is a very simple display of arpeggios and this was called love light and the beginning of it sounded like this now this might not have been the key of the original i'm just going to go with c since that's what we started with but the riff would go like this so So that's just a I chord and a IV chord in the key of C. So our I chord is, of course, C major. And our IV chord is F. So when that riff in the song Love Light is being played, it's very recognizable, first of all. Everybody knows what song it is, yada yada. But it starts with an arpeggio across that C major chord, which is a 1-3-5. So he does this thing every now and then where he slides from the flat third to the major third. I'm not going to go too far into that right now. It's just a clever little thing that makes it sound slick that's really all you need to know for now but the main part of that is arpeggio one three five and then it goes to the four chord where it goes four six one So 1, 3, 5, 4, 6, 1. 1, 3, 5, 4, 6, 1. This next example you should recognize right away. And as a matter of fact, I'm just going to play it first and see if you recognize it. Did you recognize it? If you're from my country, you did. That is the national anthem of the United States of America. And that is one of the most famous arpeggios in our country. So the beginning of the Star Spangled Banner is in fact an arpeggio down a chord.

UNKNOWN: 13:50

So

SPEAKER_00: 13:52

And specifically, in this case, I was playing it in the key of E major. Not that that's the original key or anything. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure what the original key is, and it doesn't matter. Because you can do this in any key. But I'm running down an E chord, and the scale degrees I'm playing go as follows. So this arpeggio actually kind of goes backwards. It starts on the fifth scale degree. Think about the letters for an E major chord. It would be E, G sharp, and B. The arpeggio Arpeggio in this case starts with a B, which is scale degree five. Then it goes to G sharp, which is scale degree three. And then it goes to E, which is scale degree one. And then it works its way back. Then it goes back to three, back to five. And then it goes back to an octave after that. So really it goes five, three, one, three, five, eight. As you know, an octave can be called eight or one. In this case, I'm calling it eight. So one more time. Five, three, one, three, five, eight. So I'd like to do a quick comparison of the two examples that I gave you, because the Love Light example that I gave you previous is very melodic, right? It's one note at a time, and they're connected in legato fashion, but it's really just one note at a time. But when I play the Star Spangled Banner intro... You can tell that I'm letting the notes ring over each other. So I wanted to make sure that you know, even though arpeggios are a melodic gesture often, this reflects a second style of arpeggio, which I would really just coin as legato arpeggio style, meaning you take chords... And you let the notes ring together, right? As opposed to separating them. Obviously, you can't sing that way if you're one person. And we're used to, in the United States, hearing the Star Spangled Banner at the beginning of sports contests, for example. And obviously, it's usually somebody singing it. And so you can't do legato arpeggio style when somebody's singing. So I just wanted to make the distinction between that melodic style... And the legato style. So some of you may notice that my intros that I perform on guitar are often like overtures to an opera. They give you information and thematic material about what's to come in the episode, just like an opera overture. And in this case, I recorded Asturias, a Spanish piece. And it's perfect because it has all these Spanish triplet arpeggios. And they are, in fact, legato style. So if I play them a little slow, slower and they sounded like this. And what's particularly cool about this example is that you do have these constant triplet arpeggios, as I said, but buried in the middle of all that is this beautiful E minor melody. So the melody just sounds like this. Okay. Moving around while you're getting an arpeggio sound, and really it's just scale degrees 5 and scale degree 5 again. You're starting with a 1, and then there's a 5, and then there's the octave of the 5. And then the melody moves. So really just with a couple of fifths in there to sort of imply an E minor chord.

UNKNOWN: 18:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 18:15

So that's kind of a unique way of doing it. And that's the point. Despite the fact that we start off with one, three, five, two, four, six, et cetera, et cetera, you really realize that arpeggio is powerful. It is a way to really be creative with music. And in my opinion, it really separates the clever composers from the average composers. Speaking of clever composers that use arpeggios, Arpeggios, do you recognize this one? And that is, of course, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart, written in 1787, near the end of his life. And I'm pretty sure that's one of the more recognizable arpeggio melodies, probably on the planet Earth. So I feel the need to explain this before breaking down this Mozart tune. Really, what we're sort of evolving to in all this is that arpeggios can be done in any way you want to. That's the beauty. That's the creativity. As long as you're using the scale degrees that outline the triads and the chords, you can do it any way you want. When we get to Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, I'm doing it in a different key than the original key just because it's easier on guitar, but it works exactly the same way. And that way is it starts on scale degree one. So I'm doing it in the key of C And it starts on scale degree 1. And then it goes to 5. And back to 1. And then 5 and back to 1 again. And then again. And then it finally goes to scale degree 3. And then it goes to the octave of the 5. So really what's happening there is you're getting 1, 3, 5, 3, 1, 5, 1... So you're getting a one, a three, and then you're getting two fives. You're getting a lower five and the octave above it. And so again, this is just one creative way to do it. So that's all on a C chord. One, five, one, five, one, five, one, three, five. And then it goes to the five, seven chord, the dominant seven of the key. In this case, in the key of C would be G7.

UNKNOWN: 20:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 20:56

And of course, the V7 chord is going to contain scale degrees V, VII, II, and now when you add a seventh on top, it's a IV. So you get V, VII, II, IV. And in the case of Eine Kleine Nacht music, it starts on that scale degree IV in the key of C, which is F. So it goes from four, and then it goes to two. Four, two, four, two. seven, two, five. So again, just outlining the dominant seventh chord in the key, the one that's already there that we were almost automatically going to use in any chord progression because it's extremely important. It's just Mozart did it in a charming and creative way. So it's actually just those two chords. It is a one chord in major, and then it is a dominant seven It's just a super charming melody because that's what Mozart did his whole life. In my opinion, his genius lies in the combination of how he stretches out very little music into many, many clever and beautiful things, while at the same time, making everything so charming that it's like the earworm of all earworms gets stuck in your head, can't get out. And it just gives you this fuzzy effervescent feeling because it's just so charming. My goodness. And for my last example, I'm going to go back to the pop and rock world. And I'll tell you this. I actually was not thinking of this example until I worked on the last one. And isn't that what music does? You start playing around with stuff and it reminds you of other stuff and you can end up in a completely different place. Tell me if you recognize this arpeggio riff. That is, of course, the pop song by Roy Orbison called Pretty Woman, and that is a very recognizable riff. I just feel like if you hear that on the radio, on YouTube, on any streaming that you listen to, that you will immediately recognize it as that song. And it's straight up just an arpeggio in the key. So again, I'm playing in the key of C, but this riff starts on the 5. So interestingly enough, this tune... starts on the five chord, not the one. So it'll start on scale degree five. Then he goes to seven. Then he goes to two. And then he goes to four. But also in this one, he ends up going to six. And really that could be called a ninth chord. A ninth chord would have five notes in it. two three four five and it's just thirds stacked on top of each other once again but the scale degrees would go five seven two four six so and sorry about my singing i'm not very good singer at all not afraid to admit it but anyway um so pretty woman by roy orbison a very catchy and recognizable arpeggio tune from the popping Alright, so that concludes all my audio examples for this episode. I will say there are just thousands and thousands of examples I could go through, and I'm sure I'm going to revisit arpeggios eventually. But I want to go ahead and give you a challenge this week in your music listening. The challenge is simply this. When you're listening to anything and everything you normally listen to during the week, you don't have to change anything. Can you recognize when it's arpeggio that's being played or sung and when it's not? So really just think of it as black and white at this point. It's either an arpeggio or it's not. So you can listen to some vocals, you know, melodies and see if that's happening. And you might go, hmm, that's not arpeggio. It's a melody. Or you might go, oh, wow, that is an arpeggio. But you're just trying to find out if you can differentiate the two. Is it an arpeggio? sound, can I tell the difference between an arpeggio sound and what's not? So if you're following the YouTube versions of my podcast, please leave a comment below this episode and let me know what you came up with. Like, let me know what you listened to and whether you found out whether it was arpeggio or not. And even if you're not listening on YouTube, if you're on Apple or if you're on Spotify or Amazon Music or something, there's still a function in the description of this episode that says send us a text please send me a message about how this exercise went for you like what did you find out about it and did you learn from it and lastly there will also be a link in the description that says support the show i do appreciate the support i'm working hard to create all this content for you if you would just click on that and check out the options for me it's greatly appreciated thank you so much for your support and thank you for supporting me But now it's time for Breakdown. Today's episode was all about arpeggios. And by the way, the track you're listening to while I'm speaking right now is an original composition by me and performed by me. It's called Lunar Dreams, and it's all arpeggios. That's right. Started it with arpeggios and ended it with arpeggios. We learned that basically arpeggios are outlines of triads and chords. We learned that arpeggios can be melodic, but they can also be legato. We learned that an arpeggio could outline just your basic 1-3-5 triad, or it could go as far as extended chords like 7s, 9s, 11s, etc. Thanks again for tuning in to the Harmonious Blacksmith. I do appreciate your support. And I will be looking forward to continuing this music exploration with all of you.