Welcome back to Guitar Sessions! I'm in the middle of a tour, so I have to get down to business: Let's continue with our look at chord arpeggios and inversions. Once you learn the shapes of various chord inversions, you can begin to improvise on those shapes, and that's the goal of this lesson.

Last month we looked at a few chord arpeggios in the Key of C, and we'll continue with the same idea this month. Our goal is to learn the fretboard in terms of recognizable, movable patterns that we can transpose to other keys.

In bluegrass and most popular music, important melody notes can be found in the backup chord being played at any given time. Let's consider a song in the key of C; In G tuning, our resonator guitars present a C major chord when barred at the fifth fret, so that fifth fret will be our home base. When our hypothetical song is on a C major chord, odds are that the important melody notes are C, E, or G. When that song changes to an F major chord, the important melody notes will probably be F, A, or C. But rather than move the bar to the 10th fret, our goal in these lessons is to scope out pockets of chord tones near our home base at the 5th fret.

I strongly recommend that you review the April 2008 lesson before you attempt the following exercises. The longer tab below is meant to expand and "improvise" on the last tab from April, so you probably won't achieve the ultimate goal of this lesson unless you're comfortable with everything from the previous article.

To review, in the Key of C, the 1-chord is C and the 4-chord is F. With the following chord shapes, learn how many frets up or back you need to go from the 5th fret to find the 4-chord. Once you've confirmed these chord locations for yourself, you won't have any problem transposing these ideas to other keys.

If you're a banjo player, you'll have noticed that the upper 4 strings of the Dobro® are tuned just like a banjo (high to low: D B G D), so all of these chord shapes should be familiar. Both F-chord arpeggios above are standard banjo chord shapes.

For guitarists, notice that the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strings on Dobro® (B, G, and D respectively) are tuned the same as the corresponding strings on guitar in standard tuning. It follows that if you know that an A major chord can be formed by fretting the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strings at the 2nd fret of a guitar, it should be no surprise that an A chord on the Dobro® is made by barring the 2nd fret. Likewise, an A minor chord would be made by fretting a guitar's 2nd string at the 1st fret and the 3rd and 4th strings at the 2nd fret. The same shape applies for the Dobro®, but because of the limitations of the bar, all 3 notes cannot be barred at the same time on resonator guitar. Nonetheless, this knowledge of chord shapes and note locations can be applied when playing single-note melodies or improvised lines.

Before you try the following tab, play last month's tab again. The first staff system below uses a C arpeggio at the 5th fret followed by an arpeggio of an F inversion in front of the 5th fret. The second line involves "improvising" on the F and F#dim chord shapes, followed by a lick that's based on the C chord at the 5th fret and a lick that lands on an A note at the high D string/7th fret to coincide with the change to an A chord in the progression. The third line begins with a lick based on the D chord at the 7th fret, and the exercise ends with the same lick as last month for the change from the 5-chord to the 1 chord.

These are examples of how to improvise on a chord shape-if the above tab proves difficult, spend some time with last month's article first, playing through those exercises at a slow tempo. Then, try this month's tab one measure at a time, then two measures at a time and so on until you can put it all together. When you're done, try improvising on these chord shapes by playing the notes in a different sequence, approaching chord tones from a semi-tone below, sliding to or from notes, and so on. I'll be back next month with more on this topic.

Until next month,
Ivan Rosenberg

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