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Posted by: The Professor Apr 15 2013, 02:51 PM

How to Build Major 6th Arpeggios

In today’s music theory lesson, we’ll be shifting gears and beginning to look at 6th arpeggios, which are very similar to the 7th and 9th arpeggios we’ve been looking at, only there is a 6th and not a 6th in each of these arpeggios.

To begin, we’ll be learning two ways that you can use to build Major 6th Arpeggios, starting with using the Major Triad and adding a note from there.

If you need a review of this triad, check out the http://www.guitarmasterclass.net/guitar_forum/index.php?showtopic=47757 on the GMC Forum.

To build a Major 6th Arpeggio from a Major Triad, all you need to do is add one note to the underlying 3 notes, Root-3rd-5th, and that’s the 6th, giving you the intervals Root-3rd-5th-6th.

Here is an example of that approach with a C triad and Cmaj6 arpeggio, which is often written out as just C6.






The second way that you can use to build a Major 6th Arpeggio, is to take the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 6th notes of the Major Scale, as those are the four notes you need to build this arpeggio.

Here is an example of that using the C major scale to build a C6 Arpeggio.

Now that you have learned how to build Major 6th Arpeggios, try writing out a number of them in the comments section below to get some practice with these shapes.

If you write out some, or all, of the different Maj6th Arpeggios I’ll be happy to look over your work and make sure you’re on the right track.

Posted by: jstcrsn Apr 16 2013, 03:16 AM

I ASSUME C major scale would work over this c6 , are there other scales for soloing over this chord

Posted by: The Professor Apr 16 2013, 07:48 AM

Hey, yeah you can use Ionian, Major Scale, over this chord. And depending on the situation you might be able to use Lydian, to produce a C6#11 sound, but it would depend on what was going on at the time in the song.