I worked on memorizing the relationship between chords and arpeggios for 4 straight hours today. Of course it seems easy enough, the arpeggio is just the chord tones played separately. But I'm more interested in their practical usage. Picking a chord out of a 2-octave arpeggio pattern that covers all 6 strings isn't trivial.

I'm focusing on the basic 7th chords: maj7, 7, m7, m7b5. In visualizing the fretboard, I use the locations of the roots as my primary landmarks. In the past, I've used arpeggio fingerings as secondary landmarks, filling in the gaps with other scale tones or chromatic decoration.

Since learning Jimmy Bruno's approach to chords, I've wholly embraced it, and I'm working on memorizing every possible chord fingering for the 4 main 7th chords. Understanding how these relate to each arpeggio fingering I've learned will allow me to use chords and arpeggios together as my secondary landmarks. This in turn should help unify my approaches to rhythm and lead playing.

My method of practicing this was simple. I went about my normal arpeggio routine: play all 4 arpeggios in a single position, move up a perfect 4th in the same area on the neck, repeat. Between each arpeggio, I picked out one chord that was covered by the arpeggio on the top 4 strings and one on the middle 4 strings. I use 5 arpeggio fingerings for each chord type, and there are 4 chord inversions for each group of strings, so there was usually a single chord voicing that corresponded to a given arpeggio fingering.

I hope to be ripping through these in real time without thinking so hard about it pretty soon. I'll have to slow down though, because my hand is showing early signs of tendinitis again.