Tapping Seventh Arpeggios For Lead Guitar: Lesson 2

In this lesson we’re going to expand on what we looked at in the previous guitar lesson. To do that we’re going to look at a new way of tapping seventh arpeggios. But, before we look at the lick for this lesson, let’s do a few minutes review…

A Quick Review

You’ll remember in the previous lesson that we talked about four different types of seventh arpeggios…

Seventh Arpeggio Reference Table

As I mentioned in that lesson, one of the main benefits of knowing the musical spellings is that it makes it possible for you to convert the major seventh arpeggio into other arpeggio types. This means that you can take a major seventh arpeggio lick, and create three new variations of it. To give you an example of what I mean, let’s take the lick that we looked at last time and convert it into the various arpeggio types…

C Major Seventh Tapping Lick 1:

C Major Seventh Tapping Lick 1

To convert this lick into the C Dominant Seventh version, all we need to do is find all the 7‘s in the lick and lower them by one fret. Doing this would give us this…

C Dominant Seventh Tapping Lick 1:

C Dominant Seventh Tapping Lick 1

IMPORTANT: If you don’t understand what I’ve just done, then it’s a good sign that you need to go back and review lesson one thoroughly. Of course, you could also forget about the theory for now and just learn the licks. That’s absolutely fine also. šŸ™‚

The next thing we need to do now is convert the lick into the C Minor Seventh version. This means that we need to find all the 3‘s and 7‘s, and then lower them by one fret. Once this has been accomplished, then we’ll end up with this version of the lick…

C Minor Seventh Tapping Lick 1:

C Minor Seventh Tapping Arpeggio Lick 1

To finish things off, let’s work out the C Minor Seventh Flat Five version of the lick. To do this we need to find all the 3‘s, 5‘s, and 7‘s in the lick and lower them by one fret. Once we’ve done that, then we would end up with this badass-sounding lick…

C Minor Seventh Flat Five Tapping Lick 1:

C Minor Seventh Flat Five Tapping Lick 1

A New MajorĀ Seventh Arpeggio Tapping Lick

Now that we’ve reviewed some of the material from the last lesson, let’s now take a look at a new way of tapping a C Major Seventh arpeggio…

C Major Seventh Tapping Lick 2:

C Major Seventh Tapping Lick 2

As you can see, this new lick is twelve notes long. The beginning and end of the lick are the same as the first lick that we looked at, but I’ve added an extra four notes in the middle…

C Major Seventh Tapping Lick 2 Explained

Notice how the picking-hand has to change strings each time it taps? This is a lot of fun to do, and looks pretty cool when it’s up to speed. šŸ™‚

A Few Last Words

Hope you have a lot of fun with the new seventh arpeggio tappingĀ lick. Once you can play it at a face-melting speed, then try doing the following…

  • Work out how to play the lickĀ using the other seventh arpeggio types.
  • Experiment with joining the first and second licks together. (Doing this would create a new lick that is 20 notes long).
  • Try making up your own tapping licks that combine the different seventh arpeggio types.

Have fun!

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