16: Sweep Picking Explained in 5 Minutes

Want to learn about sweet picking? Want to learn how to sweep on the guitar with ease? Then turn on the episode and let me tell you how.

And don't forget to listen to the examples that I recommend to you in the show!

Here are the sweep picking notes and examples. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the guitar Jet Podcast, where you'll skyrocket your
knowledge of theory, techniques and fundamentals for guitar. Hey, I'm
your host, Miles, and welcome to the guitar Jet Podcast.
Today I'm going to be explaining sweet picking and you
can find the notes for this episode in the link

(00:20):
in the description or on guitarjet dot com. Now let's
dive right into it. So what is sweet picking. Well,
it's a guitar technique where you play single notes consecutively
across two or more adjacent strings using a single picking motion.
This is similar to strumming, and this lets you play

(00:42):
our peggios quickly and easily. Learning how to sweep is
also the first step towards learning economy picking. Sweet picking
uses a single continuous motion either downward us and or upward,
which we call descending, and that's how you actually sweep

(01:05):
across the multiple strings. And when you're descending, you may
need to pick upwards then pull off to restart, or
just start the upward sweet picking motion. And as you're
doing this, the fretting hand needs to stay in sync
with the picking hand, playing one note at a time as.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
You move across each string. This results in your arpeggio
rather than a chord because the notes are not played
in harmony. So remember when you have a chord, all
the notes are played in harmony. When you have an arpeggio,
it's a chord played one note at a time, so
a chord played out of harmony. And here's a simple

(01:54):
sweet picking pattern, and you can find a lick associated
with this pattern in the link in the description, and
the pattern has six picking motions. It's down down, down, up,
pull off up. So when you do the three down strokes,
you want it to act as a single motion down down, down,

(02:14):
and one single motion. And then once you hit the
high eastring, you'll pick an upstroke, then pull off and
then move back up. And what's important here is that
you restart the motion. So you want to memorize. You
want to drill it into your head to go down down, down, up,
pull off up, down down, down up, pull off up.
And now let's talk a bit about how guitarists use

(02:36):
sweet picking. They basically just use it to create fast, clean,
or peggiated lines for solos and melodies. It's a common
technique in shred guitar and all styles of hard rock
and metal, especially neo classical metal and three classic examples
of sweet picking are our Peggios from Hell by Ve Molmstein,

(03:01):
Serrana by Jason Becker, and Eugene's trick Bag by Steve I,
which is from the movie Crossroads. Some common sweet picking
mistakes that you need to avoid include inconsistent pick attack
such as picking two aggressively, number two, letting notes bring

(03:24):
together in harmony rather than one note at a time,
three rushing your sweeps on the way down, then getting
off rhythm on the way up, and four playing your
notes out of sync resulting in a very sloppy red sound.
So just start slow and remember that sweet picking is

(03:45):
a foundational picking technique and it's really perfect for playing
our peggios on the guitar. And like I said, you
got to practice slowly, focus on keeping your notes clean,
and work on a variety of sweet picking exercises. I
also have another podcast episode I recorded about sweet picking tips,

(04:08):
and that episode includes some exercises which are also linked
to in the description below. So hopefully you got something
out of this episode and hopefully you understand sweet picking better.
Now go and listen to some of those tunes some
of those sweet picking examples, and go ahead and practice
the exercises that I've linked to, and thanks so much

(04:33):
for listening, Have a fantastic day.