Arpeggios and short looping figures drive a lot of electronic music, whether they come from an arpeggiator, a sequencer or a hand on the keys. This section plays them by hand, explains what an arpeggiator does with what you give it, and works on figures that loop against the bar and shift as they repeat.
Start this section in the interactive courseAn arpeggio is a chord played one note at a time. Playing it by hand builds the chord shapes into your fingers and gives you control an arpeggiator doesn’t: you decide which note goes where.
Rest a finger on each note of the chord and press them in turn. The hand stays still until the chord changes.
Three orders come up most: up (low to high), down, and up-down (up, then back down without repeating the top note).
An arpeggiator plays the notes you hold in a repeating order at a set rate. It can only rearrange what you give it, so the chord you hold decides the pattern.
Hold three notes and an up pattern loops three notes. Add the seventh or the octave and the loop gets longer and smoother. Spread the chord over two octaves and it gets wider.
The usual settings: rate (8ths, 16ths, triplets), mode (up, down, up-down, as played, random) and octave range, which repeats the pattern an octave or more higher. Latch or hold keeps it running after you let go.
In “as played” mode the order is the order you pressed the keys, so one chord can give several patterns.
A figure whose length doesn’t divide the bar drifts against it. Three notes repeating in 8ths only line up with the bar again every three bars, so the first note of the figure lands somewhere new each time round.
It’s the same idea as the polymeters in the Drum Patterns tab, where one track runs a different length from the others.
Keep the hand still and let the order do the work. Count the figure, not the bar.
An arpeggiator’s triplet rate puts three notes in every beat. With a three-note chord, each beat plays the whole chord once, which gives a rolling feel that sits across a straight beat.
By hand, think of each beat as low, middle, top. The grid has twelve steps a bar, three to a beat.
A short figure of three or four notes, repeated with small changes, can carry a whole track. It sticks because it repeats, and stays interesting because it shifts.
Change one note per pass and keep the rest. A step up or down in the scale is enough.
Keep the figure in the key’s scale and it fits each chord of the loop well enough that you don’t need to follow the chords note by note.
Arpeggios use the same chords as everything else, so a new key only means new chord shapes. Find the key’s chords (sections 4 to 7), voice-lead them, then break them up.