A key skill for making your scales and arpeggios sound musical, rather than sound like playing a scale and an arpeggio, is to learn how to integrate scales and arpeggios on guitar.
When I first started learning modes and scales, I had this idea that I had to know everything, in all positions, all over the neck. That’s cool. But when it came to arpeggio integration… well it was just too much for my brain to handle.
This is a pretty killer lick. It is just before the main solo in Liar by Yngwie Malmsteen. Take a quick listen to the arpeggio section before the solo here:
https://youtu.be/GaUCs3SoD0g?t=1m58s
Yngwie uses the arpeggios:
G#o G#o Am Am G#o G#o Am Am A∆ Dm G∆ C∆ Bb∆ Am F∆ E∆ And we get the impression that the sequence is split into the following three sections:
Section 1 (x2): G#o G#o Am Am Section 2: A∆ Dm G∆ C∆ Section 3: Bb∆ Am F∆ E∆ And it looks like we are in the key of A minor (check out chords from minor keys).
This is a very cool technique and will serve two big purposes:
Give you a new songwriting tool Help fix up what is (probably) a weak area of your playing. What we are looking at with this lesson is creating riffs using arpeggios based on two strings. Let’s quickly recap the intervals in the arpeggios that we are going to be using today:
Major: 1 3 5
Minor: 1 b3 5