Barry HarrisThe method

Chris Parks · Stage 6: Line devices

A Minor Arpeggio Ideas

Episode 84 · 9:43 · On YouTube · In the lesson player

Chris works on one of the three important arpeggios of a dominant: the minor arpeggio on the fifth, A minor over D7. Following Barry, he moves its root down chromatically through every inversion and direction, then plays Barry’s chain of minor, augmented, major and minor 6 arpeggios, showing how far one small idea goes.

Step by step

  1. 0:00Find the important arpeggio on the fifth of D7: A minor, played root, third, fifth and root on top.
  2. 0:38Invert it from the third and from the fifth, up and down.
  3. 1:21Recall the other two important arpeggios, on the root (D major) and the flat 7th (C major), and the familiar line of a root falling by half steps.
  4. 1:58Move the A of the arpeggio down a half step at a time (A, G sharp, G, F sharp) while the other notes stay.
  5. 2:37Vary the directions: first arpeggio up and the next down, or the reverse.
  6. 3:15Do the same from the third (3, 5, 1, 3), still moving only the root.
  7. 3:53Do it from the fifth, and try it on D7, G7, C7 and F7 for the rhythm-changes bridge.
  8. 4:31Play Barry’s version: one arpeggio up, down a half step, the next one up: minor, augmented, major, minor 6.
  9. 5:42Practise that chain descending too, and move it up by half steps.
  10. 6:49Practise slowly from each degree, then mix directions and skip notes to make your own phrases.

Chords and notes in this video

Tap a time to jump to it in the video.

D70:00
𝄞
C4ACEA
  1. A
  2. C
  3. E
  4. A
D71:21
𝄞♯♯
C3AC4C5GC6A♭G♭
  1. A
  2. G#
  3. G
  4. F#

Barry’s own words on this

6.1 Arpeggios on every degree; the three important arpeggios of a dominant scale6.4 Arpeggio inversions and permutations6.2 The augmented arpeggio and the diminished on the third of the dominant

In the course

Barry’s arpeggio and its inversionsThe three important arpeggios of a dominantThe moving minor arpeggioRhythm changesSmall thingsFreedom and your own voice

Transcript

  1. 0:00Hello and welcome to episode 84 of Things I’ve Learned from Bear Harris. And today I thought we would discuss just one important arpeggio on a dominant. And this arpeggio happens to be found on the fifth of a dominant. So in today’s episode I thought we would discuss D7. We seem to talk about it a lot, but D7 is nice. It’s in the middle of the guitar. And the important arpeggio is the one on the fifth, which happens to be A, which happens to give you an A minor arpeggio. So the A, if we play the arpeggio, an arpeggio for Barry is a root, a third, a fifth, or a triad,
  2. 0:38and then the bottom note repeated on top. So you’ve got this. Now what you also have to be able to do is invert that. So if we said one, three, five, one, then back down. Now we have to start on the three. Which would be three, five, one, three. And then back down. Now we’ll start on the fifth. Five, one, three, five. and then back down, and then we’re back to the root again. And we have to do them down. Now, there’s this cool move. Also, there’s an important arpeggio found on the root of D7,
  3. 1:21which would give you D major arpeggio, and then there’s one on the flat 7th, which would give you C major arpeggio. We’ll talk about, I think I talked about those in previous videos. So there’s this cool move that happens that it’s in all of music and everybody’s heard it where the root goes down to the major seven goes down to the flat seven and then goes down to the six. We’ve heard that move a million times. So but what happens is you can use that move to create some pretty phrases. So for instance, Barry has us practice this. If we start on this we’re just gonna keep moving. Every time there’s an A we’ll move it down a half
  4. 1:58step to G sharp, we’ll move the G sharp down a half step to F, we’ll move the F down a half step to, I’m sorry, G, and then we’ll move it down to F sharp. So now we got this. So I was just taking the same minor arpeggio and moving the notes down. Okay, so now, if If we learn how to do it up, we also should know how to do it down. We should also be able to do it, now this is the way he looks at it, we also should be
  5. 2:37able to do the first one up, second one down, third one up, or maybe we’ll do the first one down, the second one up. So already you start to see that there’s a bunch of things that you could do where you could sound good on D7. Already you can see you can start to build little phrases from that. So another thing that he does, well that you can think of is that’s just from the root.
  6. 3:15That’s from the root. So now if we started, let’s say from the third, from the minor third, now you have 3, 5, 1, 3. So again, still the only one that moves is the tonic, keeps moving down a half step. The other notes stay the same. So now you have something like this, which is also a pretty phrase. Really pretty. Then you have, well we can do the first one up, the second one down, same thing. Oh, let’s see. Those are also pretty.
  7. 3:53So if we can do it from the third, we should also be able to do it from the fifth. So now we have five, one, three, five. And we’re still only going to move the one. So we’ll say. That’s also pretty. Ah. That’s pretty. So I was just trying to apply one of those things to either D7, G7, C7, or F7,
  8. 4:31because I was thinking about the bridge to I got rhythm, the rhythm changes. So now, there’s another cool thing that he did one time, which was instead of just taking this. where he took, he did the first one up, came down a half step, but now did this one up. So now when you break apart what these are, the first one is just a minor arpeggio. The second one is an augmented arpeggio. The third one is a major arpeggio from the fifth of the C. And then the last one is just like a minor six arpeggio.
  9. 5:08So, what he does was he played the first one up, came down a half step, and came the next one up. Came down a half step, came the next one up. Which is really pretty. But he does it really. He does it super fast. Then he also was able to do it down. He said you should be able to do it down, which would be... Same idea for the pure minor.
  10. 5:42Now augmented down. Now maybe that C major from the fifth. So let me see if I can do that one. That one I’m not good at. I’m pretty... okay. I cheated a little bit. Yeah, those are very nice to practice. And the way I practice that is that’s D7 or A minor to D7. So I would just practice them up half steps. Maybe just do the first one G minor.
  11. 6:16And the same thing. Same thing. So look at all those different options from just that one little idea. Just that one little idea. So again, you don’t have to play all of them. You could go up one, you could say, and then maybe come down. So then I went up the first two. I’m going to go up this augmented. But now this one, I’m not going to go up anymore. I’m going to go down.
  12. 6:49That’s a nice one, C-Z. Really pretty. So these little small things. I remember the first time, well, he goes over these quite often, but the first few times, I didn’t really understand how I was supposed to practice this. And then I started realizing, okay, I’m going to just do from each degree really slowly. I’ll start from the root, I’ll do it.
  13. 7:21I’ll start from the third, I’ll do it. I’ll start from the fifth, I’ll do it. And there are so many variations and so many different ways to start one way and go backwards and go this way and start going up and then maybe come down the next couple or maybe skip a note and come up, that you can come up with a million different phrases just from this idea, just from this one thing. And this to me is the brilliance of Barry’s teaching. It’s not just that, oh, here’s this one idea of doing this, which obviously he didn’t come up with.
  14. 7:54That’s been a part of music for forever. but what he does is say okay let’s take this one idea and let’s see if we can do it as many ways as possible and when you do that when you do that with any even the simplest of ideas what happens is you go deeper into it as opposed to just saying here’s the idea on the surface and that’s as far as we’re going to go with it and that i think of all the things that barry teaches i think that is his strongest teaching method is that after you’re around him for a while, you realize you don’t just take something at face value.
  15. 8:32You say, okay, this is a pretty idea, but let me see if I can go deeper within the idea. Without changing the integrity of the idea, with keeping the idea the same, but seeing how many different ways you can do that one thing. And guaranteed, if everybody who watches this video practices a different way to do it, we could all come up with different ways to play that same idea, but it’ll all sound completely unique from each other. Or you can just go to a, let’s check out Bird’s solo or Sonny Rollins’ solo and just copy what they did. And that’s fine too. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s just
  16. 9:12copying Bird or Bud or Sonny Rollins or Barry. So a nice thing to do is maybe check out what they did with it because they all have their own stamp on that particular idea of taking the minor and moving the the one note down half step. So it’s really interesting stuff. But anyway I just want to make this short and sweet. I hope you enjoyed checking out the important arpeggio on the fifth and have fun practicing it. Until next time, thanks.