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Extended Arpeggios IV - 9th
An interesting way of adding a 9th to a 7th chord is to play the tetrad that comes from the 3rd of that chord, diatonically. For example, if we're playing in C Major and we've got a Cmaj7, we can play an Em7 over it, which is diatonically the chord that comes from Cmaj7's 3rd. By doing so, we have the notes E G B D (3, 5, 7, 9).
This would be one of the first steps to chord substitution and it opens a lot of doors for a deeper harmony study, which is not the main objective of this lesson and won't be heavily explored for now. On the other hand, I still encourage you to learn a bit more and do further research about that subject!
Getting back to our first example, we can get a CMaj7(9) mixing two chords, or arpeggios: CMaj7 and Em7. I have applied this concept to the following two licks, inspired by guitarist Derek Taylor.
The first one consists of a E7 arpeggio and a G#m(b5)7 arpeggio, which results on R 3 5 b7 and 9. If you're familiar to modes, you'll know that this lick is on E mixolydian.
The second lick is also in E, but this time we're using the Ionian mode. EMaj7 and G#m7 arpeggios.
Regarding to the technique, they're both pretty hard licks. They're a good sweep picking, legato and tapping workout. I recommend the use of a metronome, along with attention and lots of patience. As soon as you get to play them fast, however, you'll get a very sophisticated and unique phrasing, that I particularly find very interesting.
See you next time and thanks for reading!