How To Easily Play Impressive Sweep Picking Arpeggios On Guitar
Playing killer sweep picking licks is much easier than you think!
Why?
Many guitarists confuse how impressive the technique sounds with the technique's level of difficulty.
Fact is, learning the fundamental mechanics of how your picking attack needs to work opens the door to make playing blazing-fast arpeggios feel easy.
Sound interesting?
Learn easy, cool sweep picking guitar licks and how to play them fast & clean by watching this video:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Guitar Practice Tips For Getting Super Fast & Totally Clean
Emphasize observing your mistakes while playing at faster speeds.
As an example, when you are playing a speedy lick at or near your fastest speed and find that your hands aren't in sync, you need to be able to know which note( s) are not clean as you are actively playing.
To do that, your listening ability needs to become much more fine-tuned.
Get going by breaking up hard guitar licks into much smaller parts of a few notes at once. Then play these few notes at your max speed. This makes it less complicated to locate your mistakes.
Another technique that will help you during faster tempos (even more so with legato) is to move between faster playing and slower playing various times (in 10 second periods).
When you only play fast for several minutes at a time, gradually your hand becomes tired and your technique gets sloppy (strengthening bad habits).
So if you go back and forth between slow and fast playing in fast bursts of focus you are able to develop your muscle memory by going over slower technical motions before playing again at your max speed.
This is great for helping you to learn the proper motions fast and ingrain them into your top speeds.
As you start to improve your listening, you will start hearing the exact errors you make at your top speeds (with all the things you are able to play) and you know how to fix them.
Tip: How To Play With Insane Guitar Speed In No Time
To push your guitar speed to another dimension take a very small segment of any scale lick, arpeggio, or solo and perform it at a much faster tempo than you can play the full phrase at.
As an example, if you are playing this phrase at 140 bpm, play these small fragments at 5 bpm more.
This will sync both your hands and your mind used to faster speeds but still keep it manageable for you to play (since you are only working on a few notes at a time).
Then incrementally extend the segment until you are developing the total guitar lick at that upper tempo.
Needless to say, when doing this don't let your two-hand sync to get off at the higher tempos. Deal with this by double picking the notes at a much slower bpm.
How To Make Faster Guitar Playing Pro Level Tight
Often we play just a bit ahead of or behind the beat.
This leads to guitar playing that sounds off.
I got you!
This just indicates you need to train becoming more tight with your rhythm playing. Timing is a very vital skill you will need to develop, especially for playing in bands and/or doing any kind of studio work.
So, what do you do when you need to get better at playing with excellent rhythm (tighter)?
First thing to do is to find a metronome.
The optimal way to improve at it is to try recording your practice with a metronome and listen back to what you played.
Monitor for problems in your timing.
As you learn to hear where the timing issues happen, it is pretty simple to repair your mistakes and play very tight.
Note: Don't use lots of guitar effects such as echo, chorus or reverb when you practice.
These types of effects often mask mistakes in your playing (such as unplayed string noises for instance) and you don't end up fixing them. Also, when playing fast, if there is some effect in use, it makes things hard to catch all the notes making your playing sound more unclean than it really is.
One Important Tip:
Start taking lessons with a guitar teacher over learning all by yourself. It's not all hard to become stuck in your guitar playing journey and not aware of what has to get done to make improvement without someone experienced to help you.
This makes playing guitar seem frustrating and demotivating rather than pleasurable - just like it needs to be.
This is most commonly why I strongly recommend all guitarists take lessons with a good guitar teacher.
This is very critical for helping you make quick progress, because a great guitar teacher is successful at getting you to observe where you are overlooking mistakes, adjust any existing playing habits and receive new insights about playing guitar that you might not have found if you learned totally by yourself.
Not only does this make achieving your guitar playing goals more fun, it makes it considerably less frustrating. In addition, you become a greater guitarist and musician, faster.
When you are all set to reach a high peak in your guitar playing, I am currently giving lessons to new guitar students. I have taught music for over two decades to thousands of musicians around the world and am very proud of the musical results I have been honored to get for them.
Listed below is what some of my top guitar students say about taking guitar lessons with me:
“I just love guitar lessons with Tom, he literally takes the time to make a specific lesson plan and sends you lessons as you need it.”
My last lesson I took with a local guitar teacher before joining Tom, I was struggling with a sweep picking pattern, which was the 5 string root major, I was really struggling to get the rolling technique down. I took it to my guitar teacher and I was like “Help me with this, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” This is his exact phrase: “At high speeds, it doesn’t really matter if you can play it clean or not, no one can hear it anyway.” At that point, I was just like, “Ah man.” But thankfully, in that same message, he mentioned Tom’s name. Then the doors opened. That very night, I went home and looked at every single lesson Tom had, had my guitar in hand, every YouTube lesson on you know “correct motions”, “play this over chords”... just applied it instantly, and it was instant results within an hour... just from his free stuff. I was like, oh man, I’ve got to do lessons with this guy.
I remember when I first started out with lessons, I instantly jumped on the forum to greet myself, and it’s amazing how there’s like 30 responses. Just like, “Hi welcome.” and stuff... “Hi Dan, great musical tastes”. That made me feel really at home and welcomed into Tom’s forum and community. Every time I’ve had an issue when I was first starting out be it like theory or technique, there’s always been someone there who’s helped. Otherwise it could’ve been this potentially awkward process where I’d have to wait a whole week to get an answer from my teacher, who even then may not have answered it correctly and may have never solved it. Whereas there are guys on there who have been with Tom and have been through exactly what I’ve been through. They know exactly how to help, in what order, what information you need... it’s just a friendly atmosphere really.
Dan Mayhew, Stowmarket, UK
“When I first heard about Tom Hess, I saw that he was a teacher that was very dedicated and serious about it, and that drew me in immediately. That this is a guy that has a plan, has a goal and really if you’re serious about learning guitar, this guy is equally as serious in a way. So it resonated with me straight away.”
I started out just learning by myself and as many others I got stuck. I had a few issues I wanted to get by, but when I met Tom and talked with him and started lessons with him, he opened up a whole new world of possibilities of what guitar playing can be.
I feel very grateful that I found lessons from Tom since I then did what worked from the very beginning. Many guitarists I see that played way longer than I did, they have build up many bad habits. That from the very start, there was clear instruction of how to practice correctly. You build the ability for high speed and whatever you want from the very beginning and you don’t waste time doing inefficient things. So I’m very grateful that I did that, and now I really feel I am able to reach whatever level I want.
The reasons why I think I feel so motivated all the time is because I know that the thing I’m working on is relevant for me and it’s exactly the direct thing I need to get.
The forum just kicks ass. The people in the forum - it’s just like unconditional help all the time. They love to help out, and you also get very inspired by seeing someone just really getting speed really quick and then you say if he can do it, I can do it. It works on the mental side of being a guitarist and that of course that’s the most important thing. Just being around other musicians like that, is just you learn so much faster, is so much less frustration when you can see that all the people are having the same issues that you do, not anything special or anything. It’s just part of learning process, so it kicks ass.
Magnus Gautestad, Norway
“Tom was my first guitar teacher ever. I started online guitar lessons a couple of years ago and it’s what I’ve been looking for. Someone who can really help me get what I want.”
Tom really puts it back on me to decide what I want and do what I need to do to get that. That’s what so many people need when they need help - they need to know how to help themselves.
There’s abundant resources. You can always get more information. You can always get more help, especially from other people, other students, members on the forum... Most of all, it’s an opportunity for me to help myself. That’s the goal.
When I pick up something that I haven’t played for a long time with my new technique... wow, it feels different. There are plenty of songs (I’ve always played in a cover band, so I know tons of songs). There are songs I haven’t played for 5, 10, 15, 20 years... and if I pulled them up and played them, they would still feel the same way they did back them. But now, if I pull up and play a song I haven’t played in forever – Oh my God, wow! My hands do this now.
Rob Hiemstra, Toronto, Canada
“You’re dealing with one of the best guitar teachers in the world, maybe the best and you can’t get that just anywhere in the world.”
Tom is so goal focused, and I hadn’t even thought of that, it changed the way I thought of things. Tom makes you come up with musical goals and works towards fulfilling those goals. You have something to focus on, the lessons are based on meeting those goals. You’re getting better, you can see how you’re getting better and then you build new goals after that. You see the growth and development as opposed to just getting a little better at a certain technique. You’re actually developing.
Mike Larson, Milwaukee, USA
Want to get the same results in your guitar playing too? I can help you in my personalized Breakthrough Guitar Lessons. Click the green "Start Now" button to learn more.