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In my opinion sweep picking is one of the hardest guitar techniques ever. It’s hard to make a decent sounding sweep and takes a lot of time to master the skill. I’ve been playing guitar for a while and I’m still not the best at sweeping.
Sweep Picking
Sweep picking is a technique, when you move your picking finger in one direction and when you play a chord only one note from the chord will sound. That’s what we call an arpeggio. Note of a chord played separately. Let’s start with a pretty simple exercise. The trick here to make a good sweep is when you go on the higher string you will mute the lowers with your palm, just like palm muting.
Don’t forget to use a metronome. It’s crucial to use a metronome if you want to know how to sweep property. Start out slow and keep speeding up, until you can do it somewhere around 140-150 BPM. So here we go:
-|-D--D--D--U--U--U--|
e|-------14-12-------|
B|----13-------13----|
G|-12-------------14-|
D|-------------------|
A|-------------------|
E|-------------------|
Now after you got the hang of this movement, let’s move forward and let’s add a little smoothness to the playing.
-|-D--D--D-----U--U--|
e|-------14p12-------|
B|----13-------13----|
G|-12-------------14-|
D|-------------------|
A|-------------------|
E|-------------------|
It’s pretty much the same thing but you do a pull-off on the highest string, so this will sound smoother than the first one. I hope you used a metronome this time too.
Okay, now we can and some more hammer-ons and pull off, I won’t give you example for this now in a three string arpeggio. It’s time to make a four string arpeggio.
-|-D--D--D--D--------U--U-----------------------------------|
e|----------13h17p13----------------------------------------|
B|-------15----------15-------------------------------------|
G|----14----------------14----------------------------------|
D|-15-------------------------------------------------------|
A|----------------------------------------------------------|
E|----------------------------------------------------------|
Now that’s a D minor arpeggio pretty common in Avenged Sevenfold solos. You can pick then notes on the 13h17p13 part if that’s easier to you, I just played like this, to show you an example using hammer-ons in arpeggios. Let’s make this pretty decent Dm arpeggio a little bit wider. In a Dm chord you have these notes: D, F, A. Now if you look at the arpeggio above you got an F (D string 15th fret), an A (G string 14th fret), a D (B string 15th fret), an F (e string 13rd fret) and an A (e string 17th fret). So to extend this arpeggio, we can add a D, F or A in the “lick”.
-|-D--D--D--U--D--D--D--------U--U--U--D--U--U----|
e|-------------------13h17p13---------------------|
B|----------------15----------15------------------|
G|-------------14----------------14---------------|
D|-------12-15----------------------15-12---------|
A|----12----------------------------------12------|
E|-13----------------------------------------13---|
Now that’s a huge arpeggio. It will take a lot of time to learn how to do this, but I believe in you.
Keep practicing and you will get it. Don’t forget to use a metronome, and a brotip for you: The neck pickup is way much better for sweep picking, and mostly for leads.
In the next – and last – lesson of the series I will give you some exercises, with everything. Stay tuned , they will really put you on a test. ZixRyder.
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