So I recently whipped out my copy of Ozzy Osbourne’s Tribute album, a fantastic live release dedicated to the memory of Randy Rhoads, and finally noticed what appears to be a hand written lesson on extended 9th chord arpeggios in one of the picture collages. This was a perfectly timed discovery, as I’ve been spending a lot of time with Al Di Meola’s 7th arpeggio fingerings – so why not add some 9th arpeggios into the mix as well?
Randy Rhoads Music For Beginners
A note on naming conventions for the beginner – a 9th chord is what happens when we add a 2nd to a chord an octave higher. In the C# Major scale the degrees are C#(1) D#(2) E#/F(3) F#(4) G#(5) A#(6) B#/C(7) C#(8 – octave). When we add a D# to a C# major chord – and that D# is an octave higher than the other D# you could have played (the 2nd) – it’s called a 9th. For some reason the 9th sounds much more melodic than the 2nd. I’ll talk more about intervals in the coming weeks.
TAB & Staff
In the mean time I’ve attached a PDF TAB translation of Randy’s standard notation. You’ll notice that the major and minor arpeggio shapes don’t change as you move them up in the scale – that means you can move these shapes around and use them in your soloing and improvisation once you’ve committed them to memory.
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