Paul Gilbert’s Secret Arpeggio Technique

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:04]There's one five note shape which is behind every insane Paul Gilbert arpeggio lick. Most players are too focused on sweep picking to notice it and are just missing out like I was for years. So today I'm going to show you what this is, how to practice it, and how you can start using it to finally nail those fast musical arpeggios in your solos. To start, I'll show you the five notes, but also a trick to memorize it faster. Here is the minor pentatonic, which we all know and love.

[00:00:29]Now, the first two notes are simply the top two notes of that shape. So, well done. You've already got two of the five notes learned. The next note is the root note, which is here on the D string.

[00:00:40]This is fret seven if we're in a minor.

[00:00:42]So, we've got this so far. The next note up in the minor pentatonic from this note is here. Okay? And that is the next note in our shape. So far, what have we got? The top two notes and then the root note. And then the note above that. And the next note that we add, we're basically finishing this minor triad shape.

[00:01:03]And that's going to be fret nine on the G string. So we've got this.

[00:01:08]Those are the five notes. So now we have the five notes.

[00:01:14]But if you just try to pick through it at speed, it's going to be really hard and it's probably going to sound like a mess. So what is it that Paul actually does to make this seem so effortless?

[00:01:22]Well, let me show you. He starts with a downstroke and then then he does an upstroke. Then he'll do a pulloff.

[00:01:29]And the pulloff gives my right hand time to jump from the E string here over the B string to the G string. So we get this.

[00:01:42]And then here he does another pulloff.

[00:01:45]So we got this.

[00:01:48]And then upstroke on the E string. So the whole thing descending and then he'll do a hammer on on the way back up as well. So downstroke, hammer on. And that hammer on gives us time to jump back over the B string. It's the whole thing. It's going to be downstroke, upstroke, pull off, upstroke, pull off, upstroke, downstroke, hammer on, downstroke.

[00:02:16]The trouble is, even with these hammer ons and pull-offs, it's still tough to play this fast and clean if you don't practice it efficiently. So, how do we do that? Because the way that most players practice things like this is exactly the same thing that keeps them stuck. So, still the most underrated approach is to play this on a loop at a fairly slow speed or even an incredibly slow speed and only increase the speed by a small amount once you've played the pattern without any mistakes for a full minute.

[00:02:58]In some cases though, this next practice approach can be even more effective, especially when you are ready to start pushing that speed, and that is divide and conquer. What I'm going to do for this is practice smaller loops within the shape. So, for example, I might take just the bottom three notes and practice those on a loop like this.

[00:03:19]It's going to be much more efficient to work on my speed in little tiny cells of notes like this than trying to do it over a massive complicated pattern.

[00:03:26]Another way I might break this apart is just to work on the four notes which are jumping over the string like this.

[00:03:35]You can make that even harder by playing just one note on the G string here.

[00:03:46]That's actually much harder than the pattern anyway. So, we're kind of overengineering our technique here.

[00:03:50]Using variations like this helps keep your brain engaged so that you can achieve faster results with this pattern. This five note pattern sounds really cool on its own, but how does Paul take this simple idea and create lines like this?

[00:04:04]Well, instead of just looping straight up and down, he might play the descending four notes twice like this.

[00:04:15]Or sometimes he repeats the bottom three notes like this.

[00:04:21]Another thing he does is change the shape from a minor arpeggio to a major arpeggio. And you can change this to a major arpeggio simply by moving these two notes up one fret like this. So we have minor major minor major.

[00:04:43]So let's say that I'm playing over some chords like this. D major, G major, and A minor. Okay? And I can just put our shapes over the top like this.

[00:04:58]And then, and all I did in the intro lick was play over that D and that G, but I did the G an octave higher. But then also I actually did the D down here.

[00:05:12]Another thing worth pointing out, this exact shape works one string lower.

[00:05:18]This is the same.

[00:05:36]By the way, guys, if you like licks like this, there's a link in the description below where you can join my email list to get more licks and lessons to help you level up your solos faster and easier. And if you want to learn more about how to play like Paul Gilbert, I made a video about the scale which is named after him right