THE BEAST

Image Credit Photo by Drew Patrick Miller on Unsplash

Guitar players who want to shred and play killer solos start by mastering the art of sweep picking in guitar lessons like these . While it may look complicated, it isn’t! The only hard part is the regular, structured, and slow practice that is required. This isn’t fun playing like creative jamming and riffing around, it takes a lot of grueling repetitive motions! If you want to know how to sweep pick on the guitar, we can show you! However it is up to you to practice!

The Sweep Picking Motion

In the beginning it is helpful to just focus on the bottom three treble strings, don’t worry about involving the rest yet. Start with simple minor chords like an inverted A minor XXX9108 or D minor XXX141513. When we first start the pick movement don’t worry too much about the fretting hand just form these simple chord shapes and work on your sweep.

After positioning your fretting hand, pluck the G string downward and move immediately onto the B string, just let the natural pick movement guide you seamlessly into the next string. After plucking the B string go down to the E and then immediately start back up with the same motion. Slowly start using this motion back and forth, sometimes it helps to practice with muted strings, but playing with a chord will help you hear that sweeping vibe better.

Later, practice this sweep picking motion across the guitar, use open chords with all 6 strings and just get used to the consistent up and down motion. This is a core movement that needs to be ingrained in your muscle memory so keep at it. 

Muting the Strings with Your Palm

So far what you are doing above is playing lovely sounding arpeggios, this basic sweep picking movement could be very useful in many styles. However with metal guitar we want a clean sound behind each string pluck, we don’t want our notes to bleed into the next one. To stop this we will need to use our picking hand palm to mute strings not being played and those that have already been played. 

This technique here is a real pain, you need to find the right sweet spot in your palm to mute. Keeping the side strings quiet is the easier part, it’s much harder to mute as you play. As you sweep down and pluck the G string, immediately mute it as you move to the B, and do the same as you hit the E. This process is very hard for a beginner and it helps to exaggerate the movement and go slow!

This is a tricky process and you will initially mute strings at the wrong time, and it will also sound choppy at first. This is all normal, just keep practicing the pick sweeping motion on the three treble strings as you work on the palm muting. 

Fret Hand Muting

Now that you have been focusing on the picking hand, we have to start practicing more with our fretting hand. You may have noticed that having clean and smooth transitions is essential to the shredding sound when you pick, well the same goes for fret movement. It needs to be efficient and most of all we need to keep contact with the strings until we move to another fret. After the string is plucked the fretting finger needs to mute it just as the palm does. 

Once a note is picked or fretted it must END and the next note then starts, it is this clean transition that makes shredding sound so cool. It is also difficult to enact all these movements at just the right time, the fretting hand is often the weak link for beginner shredders. Another problem is simply synching these left-hand movements with your right hand at the right time.

Increase the Movement in Your Fretting Hand

We have kept the sweep picking practice easy by just playing simple chords on the treble strings that require three fingers. Now it is time to start getting your pinky involved and moving your fretting fingers more. It may help to take a break with picking and just focus on your fretting for a while. Practice some major or minor scales in easy keys like A minor and C and just hit a new note with each of your four fingers going back and forth from index to pinky.

Now as you get back into picking, play XXX9108 and then hit the pinky on 12 and sweep up with XXX91012. Move back and forth on this pinky exercise. Play as complicated of chord movements as you can, just be sure to pluck the right string you are fretting and to keep the movement going.

Note Efficiency and Sweep Picking Tips

The more notes we can squeeze in without a picking movement can help us save time and make the lick sound even cooler. Hammer-ons and pull-offs are one great way to improve your note efficiency. After a note is plucked the fretting hand can quickly lift or hit another fret and provide another note with the same hit. Just make sure you only have one finger in contact at any given time, and each note must be cleanly separated from the previous.

Efficiency and accuracy will be the key elements required to pull this cool shredding technique off. Isolate every different movement between picking, muting, and fretting while learning to incorporate them together. Sweep picking is like juggling, you need specific hand coordination to get it moving, but once you have that the result is great!

• Keep the pick inside the strings while sweeping, do not pull it out of the space as it moves up and down.
• Start slower than you think you need to! Accuracy is essential so slow and steady will lead to a smooth sound that will start to improve as you play properly.
• Practice your favorite sweep picking style songs, especially the ones you know best. If you know the song well it will be easier to hear, learn, and catch on to what needs to be played.
• Often it is easier to have rhythmic coordination in your picking hand, it may take a little more practice to find it in the fretting hand. But perfecting both helps so they stay in a perfect synchronous rhythm as you sweep up and down.
• In the heavy metal cartoon Metalocalypse the lead guitarist is often seen always practicing his fretting hand movements. This isn’t a joke! Even if you can’t plug in your guitar and play, you can still sit down and go through the motions!
• Once you get the basic movements down try using slow backing drum tracks to play along with. Start playing a chord progression and focus on sweep techniques.

Learning how to sweep pick is not an easy thing to do, in fact it can be frustrating watching guitar teachers fly through a solo and say, “look it’s not hard!” The truth is it takes a long time to get to that point, the sweeping, picking, muting, and hammering can all seem straightforward, but putting it all together is time consuming. Practice these techniques every day and eventually sweep picking will be as easy as it seems!