Broken Triads on guitar… what are they?
Broken triads is the idea of playing a triad (a 3-note chord) as individual notes instead of together. This is also commonly called an arpeggio. In this exercise, though, we will only play the 3 notes that make up the triad and then move to the next one in the scale and do the same. This way we’ll go through the whole scale. For this exercise we are using the major scale, but this can be done with any scale.
I’ve split this up into 3 parts, all at 60bpm. Part 1 uses 1/8th notes, Part 2 1/8th note triplets, and Part 3 uses 16th notes. In this way the exercise speeds up, but also works out your understanding of different note subdivisions to achieve that speed.
Position 1 refers to the CAGED system of visualizing the guitar fretboard based on 5 open chord shapes. If you’re not familiar with CAGED, that’s ok, you don’t need to know it to learn this exercise.
Part 1: Get the worksheet here.
Part 2: Get the worksheet here.
Part 3: Get the worksheet here.