Most of us learn dominant 7 arpeggios as four separate box shapes and then play them like caffeinated frogs, leaping across the neck every time the chord changes and hoping nobody notices the landing. There is a calmer way, and it involves your hand barely moving at all.
This is Exercise #9 from my technical series: 41 seconds of melodic voice-leading dominant 7 arpeggios walked around the circle of fourths, where each new chord is built from whatever notes happen to be closest by.
How voice-leading dominant 7 arpeggios works
A dominant 7 arpeggio is just four notes: root, major 3rd, perfect 5th and flat 7th (1–3–5–b7). The magic of the circle of fourths is that these chords share guide tones with their neighbour: the b7 of one dom7 slips down a half step to become the 3rd of the next, and the 3rd rises a half step to the next root. So instead of resetting to a fresh shape each time, you let the arpeggio flow to the closest available chord tone, keeping the whole thing in one small region of the neck. That is voice leading in a nutshell, and it is the same logic that powers a ii–V–I.
The concrete takeaway: pick one dom7 arpeggio, then move only to the nearest note of the next dom7 a fourth higher. Practise it slowly, notice how little your hand travels, and suddenly your arpeggios sound melodic instead of like scale drills wearing a disguise.
Do it enough and your fretting hand will get so lazy it files for early retirement — worth it. Full lesson, PDF and Guitar Pro file are over on my Patreon.