Arpeggios and Chords

Guitar music has many different functions and textures. You can play a melody on the guitar which will comprise of mostly step-wise motion. To. bring out a melody whether it’s in solo or ensemble playing, use the Rest Stroke.

We can also play accompaniment or chordal type music on the guitar. This music often takes the form of Arpeggios. An arpeggio is a chord played one note at a time, on the guitar that can often mean playing across a number of strings. To do this most effectively we use the Free Stroke which is ideal for this. We can assign a right-hand finger to each treble string to organise the fingers and create smoothness and speed.

Another texture you can play on the guitar is a chord. A chord is a group of notes played together, often the notes are stacked on top of each other in thirds (more on this later). We play chords on the guitar mostly with free stroke, again assigning a finger to a string and the playing each string at the same time.