Okay, so in arpeggio, instead of playing the entire chords like this, I am actually just going to be playing one note at a time. So the way that it works is that instead of playing the entire chord, I am doing one note at a time. So here is an arpeggio. But, I can also do this. I am doing this in a lot of music too is that you can actually finger pick the arpeggio. So watch this.
So now, how do we write down an arpeggio in a piece of music? It is pretty easy. You go like this. Here is our music up top. So you only have three notes in a chord, only three. So here is your C chord, C major chord — I see this everyday. It consists of three notes, C, E, and G. So when I am playing that chord, the only three are C, E, and G. Now the thing is like the way that it works is that this C right here is a different active C than this C right here. So here is a C, and here is a C. In the same way that on the piano, here is a C, and here is a C. So when I am finger picking, all I am doing is I am just keeping the chord but instead of going like this, I am just doing a different permutation so I might be going like this.
Okay now, the fingerpicking pattern there was these three notes that are in a chord to make a chord major or minor, are always the root, the third, and the fifth and that will never ever change. So look into this root, three, five, you can make it a four-note chord but then you start to change the concept of this chord. If I make this a fourth note chord, it would be like a C major 7 or something. Now, why a three note chord? It is because you need three notes to make that chord. If you have less than three notes in a chord, it is like a power chord or something or it is not the entire structure. It is just C, G but that does not tell me whether it is a major or a minor chord. Also if I have C, E, it does not tell me that this is a C major chord either. This could be an A minor chord for all I know. In this case, it is A minor. Now your chord structure here is three, five, root. And what I mean by that is that when I play on the piano right here, I am going A, C, E. So A is the root, C is the third, and E is the fifth.
Why cannot be there four more? Well there can be. I mean, if I were to add in these arpeggio more than four notes like if I were to do this, like C, E, G, and then maybe add a D note in there, the chord structure is C, E, G, D. So let us work on that. C, E, G, D. Now, I am working on a C major 9 chord because the C, E, G, the root, three, five, tells me that is the major triad, that is the C major chord and then the D, makes it at 9th and if you want to know what 9th’s are, you can refer to the other videos. But you can have 20 notes in a chord. Just think about this logically, the most notes you can have in any chord are 12 notes because there is only 12 notes in music.
Now, if you wanted to do — like maybe add notes like C, E, G, D, A, and B. Let us make it to the Db. We are now working on — this is now a C major 9. By the way, before C, E, G, D, this here is a C major 9 with an added 13th in it.
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