# Arpeggio (Italian, "harp-like")

Source: https://arcosounds.com/glossary/arpeggio
Also known as: broken chord

**An arpeggio is a chord played one note at a time in sequence rather than simultaneously.**

Any chord can be arpeggiated. The value for a student is that arpeggios train the hand to leap between chord tones, the intervals a scale never covers, and train the eye to recognise a chord shape spread across a staff, which is one of the biggest single accelerants of sight-reading.

On a string instrument, arpeggios usually require crossing strings and often shifting, so they double as a technical study in bow arm levels and position changes. Practising them in the same key as the day's scale is the standard pairing.

Canonical source: https://arcosounds.com/glossary/arpeggio