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It’s Hot Outside is a weekly video guitar lesson series by Jeff Beasley, author of several TrueFire courses. This series focuses on performing with depth in the most stressful environments, and throughout Jeff will give you tips on how to step outside your comfort zone to take your playing to a whole new level. Be sure to subscribe!

Video Guitar Lesson

Chart & Tab

In this 2nd installment of the “It’s Hot Outside” blog here at TrueFire, we inject the augmented arpeggio into the pentatonic blues box. The augmented arpeggio has an unstable, tension-building tonality, which believe it or not is a good thing. That means it’s sure to grab your listeners attention. In the previous post we mentioned that anything that’s unstable needs to be resolved to something that is stable. In this case we resolve into the stable pentatonic blues scale. The augmented arpeggio is one of my favorite melodic ideas to incorporate into my soloing. It never fails to spark the ears of my listeners and always gets a thumbs-up from them too!

The construction of the augmented arpeggio is all major 3rds. In other words there are 4 frets between each tone of the arpeggio, giving it the equidistant quality. So, you can take any note and move up or down consecutively in 4 fret increments, and you’ll achieve the notes of an augmented chord/arpeggio. It’s not commonly used in Rock guitar but I’ve found it to be a wonderful addition to that style as well as blues. In the initial illustration of the arpeggio there is a bit of reaching involved to remain in the major 3rd constant. The remaining examples are a smidge more player-friendly and require less of a stretch.

It’s Hot Outside is a weekly video guitar lesson series by Jeff Beasley, author of several TrueFire courses. This series focuses on performing with depth in the most stressful environments, and throughout Jeff will give you tips on how to step outside your comfort zone to take your playing to a whole new level. Be sure to subscribe!