How To Play Killer Sweep Picking Arpeggios

How To Play Killer Sweep Picking Arpeggios

Most guitarists have no idea how to transform their sloppy arpeggios into fast, clean sweep picking licks. I struggled with this, years ago, too. Playingrnclean arpeggios is one of the most common guitar technique problems I see with the guitar students that I teach.

After helping thousands of guitar students get big results, I've discovered that there are 2 ways that guitarists can approach improving their arpeggiorn technique. The first way will set you up for sloppy guitar playing and unlimited frustration at your lack of improvement. The second way will allow you torn improve your technique much faster and you will enjoy the practicing process a lot more.

Choose Your Approach

Guitar Practice Approach 1: When your arpeggio playing isn't sounding the way you want it to, your instinct says that, to improve, you need to practice more or different sweep picking guitar licks. The problem here is that more practice isn't what you need. Byrn doing this you are ignoring the fundamental problems with your technique and simply playing a lot of different arpeggios poorly. This only takes your mindrn away from the REAL problems with your guitar playing. This approach will never fixrn your technical problems.

Guitar Practice Approach 2: If you want to make your sweep picking arpeggios cleaner and faster, then you need to take the arpeggio you are working on now and make it its OWNrn exercise. By doing this you will be able to expose where your exact problems lie (down to the note) and figure out WHY you aren't playing as fast or cleanrn as you should. This will benefit your guitar playing in 2 ways:

· By correctly identifying and fixing fundamental problems with your guitar technique in this first exercise, you will see vast improvements in yourrn technique (speed and clarity) in ALL of the arpeggios you practice in the future.

· As a bonus to using this new approach, many of your exercises will often sound VERY creative and unique. This will help you improve your guitar solosrn with new sweep picking arpeggio licks.

Watch this video about how to clean up your arpeggio playing to see one of the many possible examples of how to implement this second approach to yourrn guitar practice.

rnhttp://youtu.be/PQNTc_Usaw4

Here is the tab for this arpeggio lesson using 5 strings.

How To Use These Ideas In Your Guitar Practice To Make You A Better Guitar Player:

It's important for you to understand that the lesson for you here is NOT the arpeggio exercise itself and NOT the concept of playing your arpeggio notesrn with tremolo (as in the above video). The lesson here is that you need to get in the right mindset so you can better approach solving the problems in ALLrn areas of your guitar technique:

1. The problems and mistakes in your guitar playing always have a cause. They are never just random. These causes can be identified (and must).rnThen you must isolate and fix them. You should NEVER settle for or accept careless guitar playing.

2. Searching for more guitar exercises will not be the answer to all of your technique problems. Instead, you should understand exactly where yourrn weaknesses lie in your current exercise. This will help you to see which parts of your technique need to be improved thus helping EVERYTHING yourn play be faster and cleaner.

3. Creatively modifying your exercises (even the most boring ones) will help you to create great sounding licks while also fixing your guitar technique problems.

The arpeggio exercise that I demonstrated in the video is simply ONE (of many thousands) examples of how to improve your sweep picking and overall guitarrn technique so you can be faster, cleaner and more accurate. For more strategies on how to be a better guitar player while cutting your practice time down,rncheck out how to increase your guitar speed exponentially.