"Made by 80h for the Sevenstring.org forum Welcome.

Introduction

I just want to thank everyone for being so encouraging and supportive, and I'm sincerely sorry that this took so much longer than I expected it to. I've been offered personal donations, editing help and lots of tips through my creation of this guide, and I'm flattered. It's especially great when a complete stranger offers you support in what you're doing. This forum is awesome. It's mostly just been me here in my room putting the pieces together. Having all of these people from all over the world interested in something that I want to make is so inspiring, and I probably wouldn't have written this for myself if it wasn't for you guys. So thank you one more time, and I hope there's something here for you. I love the Make-A-Wish Foundation. If you'd like to support them, you can here: https://wish.org/ways-to-help/giving/donate If you'd like to become a volunteer, you can here: Volunteering | Ways To Help | Make-A-Wish America I am extremely hesitant to accept personal donations, because that's not at all why I wrote this guide. I would prefer if you sent those to Make-A-Wish. If you'd like to show some love and gratitude, you can do that at no cost to yourself and without ever spending a dime by checking out the first post that I've made in this thread, directly below this guide. You will also be getting something else in exchange as well, but you'll just have to read the details to find out what that is and if it's right for you personally. Let's move along.

So Who is This Guy?

My name is Adam, and I've been working on my sweeps for a good four years. I practiced at least a few hours per week (and sometimes a lot more) on my sweeping technique, and I can comfortably say that most of that time was horribly inefficient, both in how long it took to learn and in my execution of the skill. I sucked. But now I'm learning quickly and completely, and there's a reason for that. It didn't happen on accident I set out to do it, and I can now say that I've succeeded. I stand by everything written here, not because I wrote it, but because it works extremely well for me. I feel like I have the formula here to learn any sweep arepeggio, shape, or pattern that I could ever want with a comfortable level of practice. With that said, I understand that there is always still room to grow and improve. If I made any mistakes, I will accept them and move forward. I will still continue to learn more about this technique, and I encourage you to do the same.

How Do I Know This Will Work? I've learned 81 different sweep arpeggios, shapes and patterns with near perfect accuracy in just under 6 weeks, compared to 200 (at best) in the last 4~ years (roughly 1 per week versus over 10 per week). This improved growth was after I built the outline of this guide and started putting it into practice. Your mileage may vary you might learn more, you might learn less, but I can guarantee you there's something here that can help you (if you haven't learned it on your own time already, of course. I know you've been practicing). I recommend that you keep track of your own growth too, as it really puts this stuff into perspective when you can see 81 different things you've learned in such a short span of time. I use a simple piece of paper and a pencil, draw a fretboard diagram of what I've learned and stash

it away for later. I have 25 pages of this stuff within arms' reach of me. Hard work counts for something. I even have a spinny desk chair so I don't have to crank my neck. Enough with the introductions though. Let's get started.

The Technical Overview Sweep picking itself has nothing to do with music theory. It is purely technical until it is applied to a musical context. What this means for you is that there is going to be a period of time where you must comfortably learn each specific application of sweeping before you can use it musically, and you're likely already familiar with this from having to learn chord changes and melodic phrasing. However, due to the sheer amount of possibilities created by sweep picking, there's a higher volume of tricky, subtle movements that are required of both of your hands. It's normal for the very early stages to feel mechanical. This is ok, it's normal, and you're on the right track. I can typically pass this stage of practice within 30-100 reps of any given shape in most instances, unless they're very foreign to me and demand more work. With that said, I would like to give you the first epiphany that changed my progress dramatically: The skill of sweep picking is heavily dependent on the way that we approach practicing adjustments in our minor details. In other words, the faster that you can solidify a small, subtle motion, the faster your learning process will be. If we practice sweeping without a strong sense of what it takes to learn accurately on a very fine level, we're going to have poor results. It's not what you're practicing. It's how you're practicing. I heard that on the day that I bought my first guitar and it keeps proving itself to me year in year and year out. With that said, the goal of this guide is to help you with HOW you're practicing these so that you can comfortably choose WHAT you want to play. Even if you're already painfully aware of this, it's worth saying again because it's just that important. Learning efficiently is the ultimate goal. We want to spend as little time and effort as possible to get the best result possible. Sound impossible? Nah. It's simple. Most of the difficulty that you're likely to experience with sweeping will come from a basic lack of awareness. Once you have that awareness, everything will be much easier by leaps and bounds. Basis & Fundamentals

Why sweep pick..? Sweep picking is great because it gives us a new way to consecutively pick up and down the strings and fretboard without using very much physical energy or straining our muscles. It is incredibly efficient for large arpeggios and ascending/descending phrasing.

A sweep can happen with 2 or more consecutive pick attacks in the same direction. For example, Down/Down and Up/Up these are the smallest chains of sweeping that

exist. The / represents a string change between the two pick attacks. If you aren't using consecutive strokes while moving up and down the strings, you aren't

sweeping. As soon as you break the chain, you've moved into alternate, inside or outside picking territory.

The process expands outward from there. There are no "rules" for the fretting hand - your hand can move vertically, diagonally, horizontally, etc, but as soon as the chain is broken with the picking hand, the sweep is over and does not begin again until 2 consecutive single pick attacks are being played across 2 strings.

(I'm not a photoshop expert..............yet) Notice how each 2 corresponds to 2 strings, each 3 corresponds to 3 strings, etc. These are all of the available groupings for sweeping. A list breakdown would look like this: 2 String Combinations: EA, AD, DG, GB, BE 3 String Combinations: EAD, ADG, DGB, GBE 4 String Combinations: EADG, ADGB, DGBE 5 String Combinations: EADGB, ADGBE 6 String Combinations: EADGBE That's -it-. Every sweep that exists (in a 6-string application, at least) will always be a movement that can be categorized into one of these groups. It's important to permanently understand these groupings, because all pick-hand technique will

fall into one of these groupings. Pretty cool right? If you understand the above picture, you'll be able to find every possible sweep option with your picking hand based on the natural order of the strings. It's an easy system to remember. Once your picking hand is well informed, you can start comfortably synchronizing your fretting hand to match the actual sweep motion. This understanding can be used to quickly and efficiently learn the picking-hand aspect of sweeping. By isolating our picking until it is comfortable, we can devote more of our focus to our fretted notes without having to fumble around with the timing of our down and upstrokes. Basic Form Imagine that you're strumming a big open chord like a G major or an E minor. As you lift the pick to go for a downstroke across all 6 strings, the notes all seem to ring out at the same time. The truth is that the pick is really just hitting each string so quickly that it sounds as though they're all ringing at once. I want you to vividly imagine strumming a chord in super slow motion, like those slow-mo videos on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71nURVXXeaM (Coincidentally there's a guitar instrumental here) Now visually imagine that you're strumming a chord in ultra slow-motion, just like in this video. As your pick slowly crosses each individual string, you fret a note at the exact moment that the pick crosses the string. As the pick continues to fall from string to string, you fret a note on each individual string to match the moments where the pick crosses the strings. If you've seen the Matrix, think of all the Neo fight scenes that slow down temporarily and then rush back up to full speed. The only major difference between this visual concept of sweep picking and the reality of sweep picking is that strumming comes from big, swinging motions of the elbow while sweep picking comes from small, short movements from string to string. How you achieve this motion will vary based on a few different circumstances. Some people will use their wrist in their sweeps, while others keep their wrist in a fixed position and sweep purely from the opening and closing motion of the elbow. Some players use a little bit more of their shoulder to achieve the effect. There's also the option of making small motions with the thumb and index finger. Then finally we have the pinnacle, which is a hybrid approach that uses a little of this and a little of that instead of creating the motion from one specific part of the body. You need to be aware of what's most comfortable and relaxed for YOU NEVER EVER EVER let someone tell you that a specific form is proper if it isn't comfortable for you or causes you harsh, painful muscular strain. The width of your arm, size of your wrist, size of your

pick, size of your guitar, position of your guitar, vertical angle of your guitar, horizontal angle of your guitar, etc etc etc will all slightly change what's most comfortable and relaxed for you. Posture in general is a crucial aspect of our bodies, and it's completely worth our time to work on. Just remember that the goal is to be AS RELAXED AS POSSIBLE to avoid excess strain. This should feel obscenely easy to do for extended periods of time with a decent amount of focused practice. Good videos to watch for posture and form: Skip to 2:48 in the video. Notice how the instructor's wrist drops slightly as he finishes while he opens and closes his elbow. Then, he starts playing purely with the drop of his wrist and no use of his elbow. I'm not sure why this guy changes it up so much, but it's a perfect demonstration of two common approaches to the sweep motion. (Feel free to watch the entire video if you'd like, but first skip to 2:48 to see what I mean about wrist and elbow mechanics) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNU9KVq5ReY Which approach is best? Whichever causes the least strain, is the most comfortable and can still get the job done. This video by Yngwie himself is quick, and it really shows just how efficiently a picking hand can move while playing at a high level. Notice how little he needs to move his hand to achieve this effect at 00:13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB86j0bJDiM Mo' fkn Jeff Loomis (Sweeping in a musical context. Notice how fluidly he is able to transition into and out of sweeps. The actual reason that this video is here though is because he is a great example of using a little bit of shoulder motion in a sweep, as seen at around the 2:40-2:47 mark.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU5R7kaLdSU Petrucci pay attention to his picking hand, and notice how both of his hands know exactly where and when they need to move together. This technique is all about synchronization. You could draw a line between his pick hand and his fret hand and you'd see that the left hand and right hand are always moving together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLn5g5qIb2k There's hundreds of other videos on Youtube, and I fully recommend doing extra research for your own benefit. Pay specific attention to the thumb, index finger, wrist, elbow and shoulder motions that they make and then decide for yourself if you can improve your form comfortably based on their approach. My 6 Fundamentals My goal in creating this list was to give myself a natural set of fundamentals that would last me the rest of my life, or at the very least a nice chunk of it.

1. Each shape, pattern and arpeggio requires its own individual time to learn. It gets easier and easier to freestyle with a sweep as you learn more and more, but any new transition and movement will require its own practice time. Some will be more difficult than others. Any arpeggio, melodic sequence, phrase or other application of sweep picking requires intentional practice of both the left AND right hand in a synchronized motion.

2. The small, individual pieces of the sweep are where all the work needs to be focused. Transitioning from the pinky to the first finger, adjusting the arc of a finger, adjusting the landing position of a finger, repositioning the left hand, etc. The small micro-movements that happen at a fraction of a second are what you NEED to pay attention to. You NEED to pay attention to this. This is huge.

3. The human brain naturally possesses the ability to reconstruct time in slow motion. You want to access this biological ability in virtually every practice session, regardless of whether or not it's a sweep session. You can slow everything down when you're practicing as if you were slowing down time itself. You were born with this skill and it was free. Use it! You'll get better at it the more you do it as with any other skill. You don't need a metronome to slow down. Develop the skill. Working with a metronome can be counterproductive when you are working on just getting your fingers to land in the right spot.

4. Once you can slow it down, tinker with or engineer each individual motion. If you are transitioning from one string to another and are having trouble with accuracy, slow that down, focus on it with all every last bit of attention that you have and watch yourself play. Smooth it out. Tell your fingers where they MUST go. This is like #2 on steroids. If your pinky is slightly out of position, it is your job to tell it where it needs to go instead. Nobody else can do it for you.

5. Playing in time and playing accurately come after the engineering stages of practice are over. If you are trying to play against a backing track or a metronome before you've successfully smoothed out all of the kinks in your micro-movements and the way the note sounds when you play it, the sweep will sound god awful and potentially diminish your motivation. Respect the fact that learning a sweep happens in gradual,

progressive stages. This is what makes the process go faster, NOT adjusting a metronome upwards and expecting yourself to just get better. Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off.

6. Respect the need for sleep. You WILL(!) get better while you sleep as your body makes what you've learned more natural and instinctive. How well you've practiced is measured in weeks, not hours. If you are too impatient to respect this, congratulations, you just learned that you have a personal issue with patience. It's a life-changing skill to have. Develop it. You cannot learn everything in a day, so it's pointless to beat yourself up if you haven't learned instantly. You still need to be able to critically judge your results in a way that will lead to your improvement, but not in a way that is self-destructive or makes you feel crappy. Keep Calm & Carry On.

That's -IT- for the fundamentals. Burn these 6 understandings into your brain until you can't possibly forget them and your results will improve dramatically. While I stand by these as a fully-functional list of fundamentals, I do not believe in strict or rigid absolutes. The fact that I understand the in's and out's of this technique does not mean that I will not question my own ideas, and I encourage you to be flexible with the information that you receive here (and anywhere else, for that matter). Even with that said, I can still state with pure confidence that if you successfully learn these fundamentals, you will see faster, cleaner and more complete growth in your abilities.

Integration: Music & You Technical Integration Applying sweep picking is as easy as any other form of picking - just because it takes a little longer to learn doesn't mean that it's harder to use. In reality, sweep picking functions the same as almost any other pick:

You can change it up with hammer ons, pull offs, slides, vibrato, bends, trills, tapping and the works. It is just another tool on your swiss army knife of techniques.

Sweeping can be used rhythmically or melodically. It has no natural style of it's own; the way that it is applied is purely your choice.

A sweep can land on any string. This makes it one of the most expansive, open-ended skills that you can possibly learn in terms of creating melodies at higher tempos. There's only so much you can do with one or two strings, and once you have sweeping, you have the juggernaut of vertical transition skills. There is a general sense that sweeping is a metal skill, but that's fundamentally wrong. Three of the most notable, early developers of the skill were Chuck Wayne, Tal Farlow and more recently Frank Gambale jazz guys. It has it's application in any style because sweeping itself has no stylistic limitations. It is purely technical until applied in a

musical context. Once a sweep has landed on a string, you can play as normally as you would have without the sweep. If you were to sweep downstrokes your 4 lowest strings on a six string guitar, you would land on G (E->A->D->G) and you could do anything you wanted with that G. You could slide a few frets, throw some vibrato in there, bend a half step, bend a whole step, hammer or pull off some stuff, play a pinch harmonic, play a natural harmonic, mozy your fingers on over and tap some notes, or you could just stop there and move your fret hand somewhere else. It's very open-ended. Sweep Tapping Sweep Tapping is one of the most common integrations of the skill and is surprisingly easy to get down. The trick with adding a tap is all about accuracy and precognition. First, your hand needs to be able to hit the exact point on the fretboard where it's landing. Let's say you're sweeping a C Minor arpeggio (C, D#, G or C, Eb, G) but want to tap the octave of one of the notes for a bigger interval or throw the 7th in somewhere. You need to know exactly where that note is, the exact path that your finger needs to travel to get there and you need to practice that transition in slow motion until you can hit the note consistently. This has nothing to do with a metronome, it's all about knowing where your finger of choice needs to land to tap the note. Just focus on being able to land in the right place at first and work on timing once your accuracy is second nature. THEN you can start piecing the shape together in time. If you try to add a tap into a sweep before your accuracy is smoothed out, you're focus is going to be divided between the movement of your fret hand, the movement of your picking hand and the position of the tap. This is just too much to process at a fraction of a second until you've earned your stripes. Improvising a tap isn't impossible, but it is definitely more difficult than improvising other techniques. (A long visual list of arpeggios is referenced in the coming section if you want to specifically work through the C Minor example.) Rolling The only guide to rolling that I've ever needed was courtesy of Justin Sandercoe of http://Justinguitar.com. The technique is straightforward, but can be a little tricky to master comfortably. I personally pull back a little bit from the shoulder to speed up the flattening of my fingertip, but that might not be comfortable for you. Check out the very same vid that I used to master this technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_7Rf2wqPy8

Muting and Noise Issues Sweep picking can be a pain on gritty amp settings. If your mutes aren't perfect, you're going to get a little bit of ambient fuzzy nonsense going on in the background and it can be annoying as all hell. You can always cheat with a scrunchie kept behind the nut, but aside from that, you're going to need a little bit of pizzicato/staccato skills. With a guitar and specifically sweep picking, the only way to effectively mute the notes consistently involves a blend of hand positioning and a precise end to the notes being played (see here: Pizzicato - How To Execute It Cleanly). The hand positioning is very much like palm muting, but sometimes you will need to extend your pinky to the highest strings to keep them from being noisy little bastards.

My Personal Muting Method

My muting method is a little bit more complex it involves both hands and a specific lift technique. It is inspired by all those natural harmonics I ruined. When I'm lifting my fingers off the note, I lift my finger to the same point where a natural harmonic would normally be muted this completely deadens the strings ringing. (If you're not familiar with natural harmonics, I recommend this lesson by my first guitar teacher, David Taub: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAP0je2gwSQ) Anyways, when I lift my finger off the note, I basically mute the string with the tip of my finger at the same time that I begin playing the next note in the series. I also can use the palm of my picking hand for the rest of the strings, or I can use the palm and fingers of my fretting hand against the strings to mute them. I have lots of options. Palm muting usually works for most folks, but I definitely recommend that you pay attention to the way that your fingers lift off of the strings. Play any note you want with your index finger and let go of the note very slowly without necessarily taking the weight of your finger off of it. At a certain point, it will be naturally muted by the weight of your finger. Again, this takes a lot of finesse and happens in a fraction of a second, so you need to be prepared to do this slowly and accurately before you can apply it musically.

Links that I don't know where to fit in any other place so they're going here just because

Other helpful article snippets include: A Clean Sweep: Mastering Sweep-Picked Arpeggios with Yngwie Malmsteen | Guitar World A Clean Sweep: Mastering Sweep Arpeggios with John Petrucci | Guitar World

Theoretical Integration Using sweep picking from a theoretical perspective is as easy as understanding where chords are located and finding a way to apply them musically. If you are new to theory, use link A and B. If you've got a good hold on theory, just use link B. Link A If you are brand new or still wet behind the ears with your music theory skills, go here: http://www.zentao.com/guitar/guitar-lessons.html The username and password prompt gives you the username and password that you need to enter the site. The calculated password is just adding 1 to the long string of numbers that they give you. It is worth the hassle to log on here and get a basic course on theory because everything here is awesome, and I do not have time to write a 101 course on theory. This site makes it extremely easy, and it's written in a 1-2-3-4 linear order. It's awesome. I love it. Link B If you already know what key or scale you're playing in and just want a list of arpeggios to work from, go here: The Big Bad Arpeggio List Arpeggio Patterns and Diagrams For Guitar in all Keys This is the mecca of guitar arpeggios. Everything that you need is listed in the upper left hand corner.

My Personal Sweep Picking Exercise Routine

1. Clip and file nails. 2. Stretch both hands lightly. I stretch between each finger, both wrists, my forearms,

elbows, shoulders, neck and back. 3. Warm Up (15 minutes, but never strictly timed). I don't care what I play to warm up

my only goal is to get my head in the game. Once my mind is focused on music, and my fingers feel good, I'll set a metronome to 10 BPM and play, then 100 BPM, then 150, then 200 and then 250. This gives me a broad spectrum of comfort and I can start practicing at whatever speed I want.

4. Pick 1 Arpeggio, 1 General Shape and 1 pattern-based approach. An arpeggio is self-explanatory. A general shape is just something that resembles an X, a diagonal line, a

greater than symbol, etc. It's just a way of thinking outside of the box. A pattern can musical (Root, 2, 4, Octave, 9th, Dim 12th) or physical (3rd Fret, 4th Fret, 4th Fret, 3rd Fret, 3rd Fret 4th fret). Those are just examples and there's probably billions or trillions or quadrillions of patterns but I really don't care how many there are. If there's more than 100,000 I just group it into the ahhh **** category of numbers.

5. Play all 3 very slowly and write notes on which transitions are lacking. If my pinky is being unruly, I note that down and specifically work on my pinky. I do this because there's no point in practicing parts that I can already do successfully, it's usually just a waste of time. By focusing on my weakest areas, I improve the amount of growth that I get out of each minute by 50% or more. For example, if I'm sweeping 6 strings and only 1 transition is giving me problems, I save a lot of time by only playing that transition over and over ad naseum instead of playing all of the transitions. If I stretch out a sweep to take 10 seconds and only 1 of those seconds are spent working on the actual transition that I need, I've basically wasted 90% of my practice time. 90% is the difference between a 10-string guitar and a 1-string guitar. That's a whole lotta difference.

6. If anything's giving me troubles, I'll make an extra note of that. I take a break after 30-45 minutes of this stuff because I'm usually mentally fatigued by then. After that, I'll either listen to music, work on things that actually pay the bills or do one of the various other activities that permeate my life.

7. I repeat this cycle a few times per day as time permits, or at least I have while writing this guide. The next part of my guitar life will see me working on writing and playing a few instrumental guitar ideas that have been running through my head for the last 2 or 3 years, so there won't be as much time to practice this technique. Fortunately, I can learn quickly and efficiently as a result of everything you've just read, so I'm not really sweating my ability to pick anything up that's required for me to make music in the future.

This is fun. Keep that in mind. Have fun with learning and you're doing better than everyone that's sitting there miserably in some dark room whining over how they just can't get it. If you're enjoying yourself, you're winning. It's that easy.