Add new life and variety to pieces
Technical exercises can be very dull to practice - some might even say excruciating!!
You might even have to force yourself to practice exercises, even though we all know how beneficial they are (sort of like how eating our bland vegetables is actually very good for us).
But here is a whole new view on one of the most foundational technical exercises we can practice - arpeggios.
You can use arpeggios to add variety and creative life to passages you're playing or composing.
This works particularly well for passages in block chord texture, which can sometimes sound bland and overly repetitive.
First, I'd recommend watching this short clip from a recent workshop, where I show you how you could use arpeggio exercises to open up new horizons in your playing.
Let's look at how this could apply to a piece by Carcassi. What happens if we add an arpeggio by Giuliani? We end up with something more flowing. Notice too that the melody becomes displaced onto the third note of each triplet, providing some exciting variety.
Here's a more advanced example - adding Giuliani's arpeggios to Villa-Lobos Etude #1.
Here's another example by a modern composer, Leo Brouwer. In his study #6, Brouwer gives an optional arpeggio pattern you can use.
But, even the old masters like Sor and Aguado were using arpeggios to add variety. Here is a fairly obscure Sor study (or two studies - 8 and 9 - from op.60), where he simply adds an arpeggio pattern to the block chords.
The arpeggio is identical to Kirkman's #3 - coincidence?!
And Aguado's example, played in the short clip above:
Can you add arpeggios to a passage you're playing?
If you don't have any arpeggios to use, try out these very obscure ones by Louisa Kirkman. 24 patterns is a bit easier to grasp than 120!
