Learn How To Use Sweep Picking Arpeggios More Creatively With Scales
Playing the same arpeggio over and over gets boring quickly... You make your sweep picking sound much more creative and interesting when you combine it with other aspects of your guitar playing. Using scale runs together with sweep picking helps you play killer lead guitar licks that sound better than using basic arpeggios on their own.
Watch this guitar video below and learn how to combine sweep picking with cool scale sequences:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Commonly Missed Guitar Playing Cleanliness Issue: Not Having Consistent Skills
Watch out for when you have inconsistencies in how you attack notes.
To address this, record the same guitar lick a couple of times into your nearest recording app and (if possible) pan one track fully to one side and the other completely to the other side.
Afterwards listen (using headphones ideally) and identify where sloppy playing mistakes occur. This will be simple, because once you notice anything that sounds one way in one ear/speaker but not in the other, that means there is a problem.
Figure out what that problem is (by listening to each recording by itself) and then when you get started playing again, make sure to keep that area tight.
As an illustration, you may notice that you have a tendency to play the same part either with different pressure in your palm muting. This will mean that you should target your palm muting in that segment of the piece and keep the pressure unvarying while playing.
If you see that one track has string noises in a specific spot but sounds clean in the other, that means you need to more diligently watch your muting techniques as you play that part in the music to make sure that the noise never happens.
This makes your aural skills more fine-tuned so that you can become more aware of your own flaws and deal with them.
Do this routine as part of your guitar practice and your playing becomes rhythmically tight.
Do You Struggle To Play Clean & Tight? Give This A Shot:
Ever play a guitar lick or run during a solo and you are ahead of the click in a number of places (most notably when a lick repeats)?
This helps:
Record a quick phrase (preferably) into music software that shows you the grid of beats so you can see where the things you play ) line up or don't line up with the beat.
This gives you immediate visual and audio information on how close you are to being completely in time. That said, you should also begin recording your general practice sessions and then listening to your subtle mistakes very attentively (using headphones if you have them) to spot when you play notes a little before the click happens. You have to pull away mentally a bit more to make them take place in perfect time with the click.
How To Clean Up Your Sweep Picking Licks To Use While Soloing
When you practice sweep picking, use distortion rather than of a clean tone.
This is important since you will be playing with distortion while playing arpeggios in this manner a lot of the time (supposing you are a rock musician).
So, it makes sense to practice just how you will play, a minimum of 80% of the time-- and in addition, this makes you more observant of any problems of string noise that show up. Mistake-filled playing (and string noise) always sounds more noticeable when using overdrive, so practice with it to get rid of your mistakes.
Here is another tip:
Takee guitar lessons with a guitar teacher rather than learning alone.
It's extremely easy to find yourself stuck in your path towards your goals and not aware of what you must do to make improvement without someone with tons of experience to teach you.
This makes trying to get better at guitar feel frustrating and demotivating rather than enjoyable - just like it ought to be.
This is a major factor for why I highly recommend all guitarists take lessons with an excellent guitar teacher.
This is very vital for helping you make tons of progress, because a really good guitar teacher is successful at getting you to understand where you are making mistakes, adjust any of your sloppy habits and obtain new insights about playing guitar that you might not have learned about if you learned completely by yourself.
Not only does this make learning about guitar more fun, it makes it so much less frustrating. In addition, you become a far better guitarist and musician, at a faster rate.
When you are driven to achieve a higher pinnacle in your guitar playing, I can help you with that in my Breakthrough Guitar Lessons.
I have given guitar lessons for decades to thousands of musicians around the world and am very proud of the musical skills and victories I have been able to get for them.
This is what a few killer guitarists say about taking lessons and how it changed their musical lives:
“Before the online guitar lessons, I had a lot of trouble with phrasing. I couldn’t make good note choices, I was always fishing for the next note. I was trying to think of ways that I could play, but it didn’t sound good. I didn’t know how to write songs, it was absolutely terrible, everything sounded the same. I couldn’t really… I didn’t feel confident with my playing. I definitely couldn’t build speed for anything, I was really sloppy and I was dissonant… and it was really painful to play.”
I chose Tom Hess because when I read his articles they blew my mind away. I got so much out of that, that I didn’t get anywhere else.
The main reason I like taking lessons with Tom online is because, number one: yes it was the personalized lessons strategy… I read everything about it, and it was so compelling, just like that he really takes everything that I can or can’t do into account, and then he’ll take what I want to be able to do and then basically map out every step of the way until I get there. And that was just really powerful, and that I’d be able to get feedback every 6 weeks, and the fact that we’ve got the forum. We’ve got instant help and they all really know what they’re talking about… they’re not just like anybody… they… I mean some of them are virtuoso guitar players... I mean, they know their stuff and then of course the mindset of this whole environment. The friends I’ve made here just… I can’t really put into words.
I didn’t have a budget when I started. I had a good enough job that I could take lessons for however long I wanted, so that wasn’t a problem, but I feel like I’ve gotten 100 times what I paid you know.
Matteo Miller, San Diego, California, USA
“Before I took lessons with Tom Hess, I wanted to learn how to do some sweep picking and I also wanted to fill in a few gaps that I thought I might’ve had in my playing. And also I was feeling a little bit frustrated with not knowing where to take my playing. I didn’t really know how to get better. I felt like I reached a plateau, so that’s why I sought out Tom.”
I’ve had a few other guitar teachers before I took lessons with Tom, and most of them weren’t very good. And after reading a few articles online that Tom had written, I could tell that this guy was going to be the teacher for me.
The biggest thing that I really like is the actual guitar lessons themselves. I’m finding that I’m learning new things that I never even considered every single time I get a lesson. Something new to apply to my playing each time. But of course, I really enjoy the forum as well, because thanks to the lessons with Tom, I’ve been able to meet people from all over the world who have similar experiences and similar goals, so that’s been really motivating as well.
Before I took lessons with Tom I really didn’t like improvisation. I knew scales, and I knew kind of how they applied over chord progressions, but I just didn’t like it. Since taking lessons with Tom, some of the lessons are focused on that specific issue, and now I feel really comfortable about getting up in front of people and playing over any type of… in any key any backing track, I feel pretty comfortable doing that.
Tom actually knows what my goals are and gives me specific lessons that will help me achieve those goals. Other teachers that I’ve had before just do it their way… it’s either their way or the highway. And they don’t really care about what I wanted to do, and they didn’t really listen, and they didn’t really look into what I was doing or what my interests were and didn’t really play into that.
It’s really motivating to get to know people who are also students of Tom. It’s really good to have positive-minded musicians around even if I’m just talking to them online, or if I meet them in person, either way it’s still really motivating.
The forum has helped me because I am able to ask any music theory related questions or technique questions and I get those answered very very quickly. And I also like to participate in discussions and help share my knowledge as well with other people, which when I do that I feel that it’s reinforcing the things that I know as well, so it helps with my music theory knowledge when I share as well.
Greg Trotter, Melbourne, Australia
When I started learning from Tom, the main thing that made him different from other teachers was that he was showing me how to excel in all aspects of my guitar playing by applying the skills that I already knew together with the new material that I was learning from him.
He made me aware of both strengths and weaknesses in my playing that I did not even know I had. From there he gave me the knowledge, tools and guidance to literally transform my guitar playing by enabling me to overcome things that were preventing me from becoming a truly creative and self-expressive guitar player. These were the kinds of things that none of my previous guitar teachers and books I studied were able to do for me.
After Tom made me aware of all the things I was missing in my guitar playing and provided me with the strategy and tools for solving them, I began to make very fast progress in all areas of my guitar playing.
I can now write my own music and can create lead guitar solos that I am happy and fulfilled with. I also have the technical skills to confidently and easily play anything that I want to express. I have overcome all of the lead guitar challenges that I struggled with before, and increased my guitar speed to virtuoso levels. More importantly, I have the knowledge and understanding of how to continually improve my guitar playing and musical skills to higher and higher levels to continue expressing myself with my music. Overall, I have definitely transformed in a huge way as a musician and as a person through my lessons with Tom Hess. I am grateful to him for guiding me towards becoming the guitarist I always wanted to be!"
Mike Philippov, Indiana, USA
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