Let me start out by describing sweep picking. Sweep picking is a technique on the guitar that allows you to play chords one note at a time. With a lot of practice it can be the fastest way for a person to play, but it takes a lot of time patience and discipline to get this down, and to make it not sound sloppy! What you do is a consecutive motion of down strokes from string to string playing one note at a time. You in turn can do consecutive upstrokes on the same or a different chord shape. You will "sweep" up and down the strings hence the name.
Lets start sweeping! First and foremost, and this is the absolute most important thing about sweeping in my opinion. You must keep your pick perfectly flat! By flat I mean that it needs to be parallel to the floor. I cant honestly tell you how many times I have seen kids trying to sweep and their pick is all over the place, bending up and down, this doesn't work and needs to be stopped.
For me I also only use the tip of the pick, I am talking about less than an eighth of an inch, (I also use this in my alternate picking, but we will get to that in a later post,) this allows for less of the pick to get in the way of the strings. Go in a smooth motion up and down the strings making sure to keep the pick perfectly flat!
To start though you definitely need to go slow, and I personally recommend starting off with a three string sweep. I am sure most of you are familiar with an open D chord, use this shape and move it up and down the neck. This is a great exercise to get you started with sweep picking. You can also alternate between a D major shape and a D minor shape, just to get your fingers used to two very common chord shapes. When I say slow I mean slow start off with a metronome at 60 bpm and do quarter notes, thats right one not per beat, one note at a time, until it is perfect, and then slowly increase the metronome by three bpm, making sure that your technique is prefect. Slowly start to build speed, and when comfortable slowly start to add strings.
This is just a quick guide to starting sweeping, there is so much more that you can add with your practice and I want to recommend a book to you all. You NEED to pick up the Guitar Grimoire series. Specifically the arpeggio book for sweeping. This will show you all the possible arpeggios on the neck and will open you up to an unlimited amount of exercises up and down the neck!
Thanks for checking in all I hope that I have helped and please ask any questions in my comments and I will definitely get back to you in a timely manner!
Cheers,
Sammy Jo
This is a great post. Almost all guitar players easily learn how to sweep "upward". I'm surprised at how many guitar players do that so well, but sound terrible when sweeping back downward, and simply cannot do patterns where only downward sweeping is used. I would only add "practice slow in both directions and don't even think about speeding up until you can go both upward and downward at the same even tempo."
ReplyDeleteThat is an absolutely wonderful comment and I couldn't agree with you more!!! And it is funny that you say down picking for most, I must be backwards because it was the up strokes that really messed me up. But thank you so much for your addition to my post and I hope to see you more on here!
ReplyDeleteYeah, upward always gets me too! Anyways, awesome post, dude! To be honest, I'd totally forgotten about what you told me about keeping my pick flat and I feel stupid for letting that tip slip away in the first place! lol I practice that little sweeping exercise that you showed me almost every day and its one of my favorite things to do. :D I'm going to try the parallel pick thing tomorrow and see if that doesn't improve my speed or at least make it a lot easier haha :P. Thanks again, Sam! I'm looking forward to more posts(:
ReplyDeleteHey Bryce thanks for the comment bud! And I am glad that you still practice that but trust me, once start controlling your pick it will make such a world of difference. Let me know how the practice goes, and I have a website that I am in the process of releasing here that is all about sweep picking so I will keep you informed of when I am ready to push that one live!
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