Hey guys, welcome back to another guitar lesson. Today I want to show you how to play a bunch of classical arpeggios on acoustic guitar using this awesome delay trick.

So, what’s an arpeggio?

An arpeggio is a chord broken down into single notes. You can turn any type of chord into an arpeggio by single out each note of the chord. A C major arpeggio is played with the notes C E G which are the same notes of the C major chord. 

In this guitar lesson, I am going to show you how to transform a classical chord progression into beautiful arpeggios played with a double-tap delay effect. With this simple delay trick, you can double every note you play and make each arpeggio rhythmically interesting.

We will start by learning the arpeggios one by one. Then I am going to teach you how to set the delay effect.

The arpeggios can be played on acoustic or electric guitar (even classical if you want). I am using the right-hand finger to pick the strings but it could be done with a guitar pick too. It’s totally up to you how you want to approach the arpeggios with the right-hand.

More info in the video lesson.

About the Delay

One of the things that took a while to figure out was how to set up the delay.

If you want to get this amazing delay effect there are three elements that must work perfectly together: The exercise speed (also called Bpm), the note value set for the delay, and the delay speed.

In the exercise, the arpeggios are played in triplets, meaning that I am playing three notes per beat. The metronome is set to 90bpm but if I set the delay at 90 beats per minutes with a dotted eighth note value things don’t really sound good.

The dotted eighth note only works if I play four notes per beat. So if I change the arpeggio from triplets to sixteenth notes, the delay works perfectly.

But the question is “How can I set up the delay if I play triplets?”

I didn’t really know how to do it so I had to experiment with it a little bit. The first thing that worked better was changing the dotted eighth note into a quarter note value.

A kept the speed at 90bpm but it didn’t work with the delay so I doubled the speed on the delay at 180bpm and I finally got it! When I play the arpeggio at 90bpm the delay will now double each note on time.

Once you know how to set up the metronome and delay speed correctly you can play the exercise at a lower speed along with the delay.

Quick tip! The same delay effect can be achieved by setting the delay speed at 350ms. This parameter gives the same delay time as a quarter note value. 

Enjoy this lesson.