Guitar Tabs Exercise: 4 Tones Arpeggios in the Mixolydian Scale

Guitar players that start to learn how to play lead guitar solos often complain that their lines sound like an endless scale, instead of a meaningful melody.

This happens because the most common way to practice lead guitar is to execute endlessly scales up and down.

So if you feel trapped in scale shapes, here's a great exercise that will help you unlock the musicianship hidden in any scale pattern. On this page you find the guitar tabs pdf of the exercise, the Guitar Pro file and the mp3 audio .

This exercise will help you:

• Break the cage of scale fingerings
• Gain fingers strength and agility
• Sounds better on chord changes
• Understand better the fretboard

All in a single 4-frets scale pattern.

The G Mixolydian Scale

So, let's start with the G Mixolydian scale pattern at fret 3.

G Mixolydian Scale

From this scale pattern, we're going to identify all the 4 tones arpeggios within the scale. To do this, for each note in the scale, we proceed by thirds, until we get to the higher octave (here you find a complete tutorial on chords construction )

G7 Arpeggio

Am7 Arpeggio

Bm7b5 Arpeggio

Cmaj7 Arpeggio

Dm7 Arpeggio

Em7 Arpeggio

Fmaj7 Arpeggio

G7 Arpeggio (higher octave)

Am7 Arpeggio (higher octave)

Bm7b5 Arpeggio (higher octave)

The exercise consists of playing all these arpeggios keeping the fretting hand on the G Mixolydian position:

• The index finger will take care of the notes on fret 2
• The middle of fret 3
• The ring of fret 4
• The pinkie of fret 5

Practice this exercise until muscle memory internalizes these movements, and you'll find yourself playing more melodic and less "scalesy" guitar solos.

You can also expand this concept and apply the arpeggio in scale exercise to other scale positions .

Arpeggio In Scale Guitar Tabs Exercise: Conclusion and download links

We have just seen a great exercise that helps us unlock the "sound like a scale cage" and train our fingers at the same time.

Here below you find the downloads related to this exercise:

• Guitar Tabs Pdf
• Mp3 of the exercise (80 Bpm)
• Guitar Pro tab (to open this file, you'll need the magic software for guitar tabs Guitar Pro )

If you want to make progress faster on guitar, through a step-by-step learning program, be sure to check out our report on the best lessons, strategies and tools to improve your guitar skills.