Diatonic Arpeggios You Can Really Use

Stop drilling arpeggio patterns you'll never touch. Start pulling them out of the scales you already know.

I always hated arpeggios. At music college they handed me an inch-thick book of etudes — the kind you grind on for hours that change nothing about the way you actually play. Scales I loved; you could improvise with them straight away. But arpeggios stayed locked in that etude book, gathering dust and faintly embarrassing me.

Then a stupidly simple thing clicked: arpeggios are just parts of scales. Not a separate library of shapes to memorise — they're already sitting inside the scales under your fingers. Once I started seeing them that way, and tied it together with a bit of diatonic harmony, the whole thing opened up.

That's what this book teaches. No clunky standalone patterns to drill. You learn to spot the arpeggio hiding inside a scale you already know, in one key — and it's identical in all twelve.

What you'll walk away with:

• Every diatonic arpeggio — triads up through 7ths, 9ths, 11ths and 13ths — pulled straight out of the major scale
• The realisation that scales and arpeggios were never two different things (by the last chapter you'll see them as one)
• A real way to use them: an approach to soloing where any arpeggio can be played over any chord in the key, each one giving a different colour
• A colour matrix mapping all seven arpeggios against all seven chords, so you always know what you'll get before you play it

Who it's for:

• Players who know the major scale around the neck but can't make arpeggios sound musical
• Anyone sick of etude patterns that never make it into their actual playing
• Intermediate guitarists who want to solo with intention over changes, not just run shapes up and down

Who it's not for:

• Total beginners — get the major scale under your fingers first
• Anyone after tab to memorise; this is about understanding, not copying

Inside:

1. Arpeggios Are Parts of Scales
2. Triad Arpeggios
3. Seventh Arpeggios
4. Ninth Arpeggios
5. Eleventh (and Thirteenth) Arpeggios — full circle back to the scale
6. Putting Them to Work: soloing over the changes, with the seven-colours system and the chord/arpeggio matrix

Instant PDF download. Read it on anything.

It's free. Grab it — and if it clicks, this is one slice of a bigger idea: that everything in a key is parts of one scale. The whole system — chords, modes, progressions and soloing with direction across all of it — is in my book Hacking the CAGED System: Diatonic Harmony. But start here.