Guitar maestro, Rusty Cooley, in his shred-tastic DVD set Arpeggio Madness introduces a couple of ideas that I have found very useful; in particular his shapes for diatonic 11th and 13th arpeggios.
Now, Arpeggio Madness is clearly geared towards the sweep picking metal-head but I still like the shapes he introduces even though I’m long since past having any pretensions to that style of playing.
Rusty’s approach is to take fairly conventional arpeggio shapes that involve a glissando to extend the range of the arpeggio but to add a twist at the end. For example, here is a fairly conventional Gmaj7 arpeggio.
Rusty takes this and tweaks the second octave shape by dropping the highest root, major 3rd and 5th but adding the 2nd (9th) and 4th (11th). In the diagram below I’ve left the 3 removed notes so you can see the difference.
I find this much easier to play that the original Gmaj7 arpeggio.
Anyway, I encourage you to give Rusty some love and buy his DVD set – there’s tons more content than this – but here are the diatonic shapes I’ve been using.
Insanely helpful