Three Ways To Clean Up Sweep Picking Arpeggios Fast

Tired of playing sloppy sweep picking arpeggios when you turn up the metronome? Good news: You don't have to practice slowly for a long time to clean them up.

Here are three guitar practice strategies to help you clean up your sweep picking at fast speeds:

Guitar Practice Approach #1: Combine Tremolo Picking With Arpeggios

Adding tremolo picking to your sweep arpeggios helps you articulate notes better and iron-out your mistakes. Take any arpeggio and tremolo pick a random note within it while sweeping up to that note as normal.

Your goal is to make the note you are sweeping up to sound as articulate and clean as possible.

Using tremolo picking in this way helps you pinpoint your focus on one note to make it sound perfect. Do this for every note in the arpeggio.

While using this approach, don't think too much about how many times you should tremolo pick the note (determine this by feel).

Use this approach at your top speed while practicing just a few strings of an arpeggio at a time to clean up your playing fast.

Guitar Practice Approach #2: Rotate Focus From Note To Note

Play through any given arpeggio many times. Then select any note within that arpeggio that you want to listen to specifically while not listening to the others closely. Play through the arpeggio until this one note sounds as perfect as possible.

This means you can hear it clearly (no noise coming from unmuted strings), it doesn’t bleed into other notes. Work on fixing your mistakes without slowing down.

Next, shift your focus to listen for the next note in the arpeggio and repeat the process until you’ve gone through every note.

Find the fastest tempo at which you are able to practice in this manner. Once you refine each note of the arpeggio, raise the tempo of the metronome and repeat the process to get faster.

Note: These are just 2 of many ways to practice sweep picking. Learn many more ways to shred clean arpeggios by reading this article filled with sweep picking advice.

Watch this video to learn how to play sweep picking arpeggios melodically while soloing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXFdQXAyUO4