Pentatonic Sweeping Workout: Fast Sweep Picking Guitar Licks
EMAIL TO GET ACCESS
By submitting your info, you agree to send it to Tom Hess Music Corporation who will process and use it according to their privacy policy.
Pentatonic guitar licks aren’t exactly meant to be played fast, right?
BZZT!
Wrong.
And I'm about to prove it to you.
Because, in this lead guitar article...
I’ll put you through an awesome pentatonic sweeping workout that's a lot of fun to play.
We'll be using pentatonic guitar licks that quite easy play fast.
(And they are a lot of fun to play in guitar solos.)
Oh, and don't let the name 'pentatonic sweeping fool you.
You can use these licks in every rock-based guitar style.
Plus: they sound good at every tempo.
The best part is...
You don’t need to practice a lot to make these licks sound good.
EMAIL TO GET ACCESS
By submitting your info, you agree to send it to Tom Hess Music Corporation who will process and use it according to their privacy policy.
To begin...
Watch this pentatonic sweeping video to learn these easy and fun pentatonic guitar licks:
Now that you’ve got some pentatonic guitar licks under your fingers and understand what pentatonic sweeping is all about...
Here are 5 more lead guitar ideas that help you use these pentatonic guitar licks in your guitar solos, while sounding more pro and having more fun:
Pentatonic Sweeping Tip #1: Learn All 5 Pentatonic Scale Shapes
Pentatonic sweeping aside, when you ask your average lead guitar player to play some pentatonic guitar licks, what do they do?
Yep – their fingers go straight to the 5th fret box pattern of the A minor pentatonic scale – even before knowing what the key is!
Well, if you want to play pentatonic guitar licks like a pro and do pentatonic sweeping the way I showed you in the video above...
You’d better know all 5 shapes of the pentatonic scale all over the fretboard.
Why 5 shapes?
Answer:
The pentatonic scale has 5 notes. And if you play the pentatonic scale starting from each of those 5 notes, you get 5 patterns that connect together to cover the entire fretboard.
Knowing all 5 shapes by heart allows you to play lead guitar licks all over the guitar neck and have a very easy time learning and applying these pentatonic guitar licks to your guitar solos.
Watch this video to see an example of what I mean by memorizing scale shapes all over the guitar:
Bonus tip for memorizing pentatonic scale shapes (that will help you memorize pentatonic guitar licks and do pentatonic sweeping more easily):
Practice memorizing scale shapes away from the guitar.
Like this:
Put your fretting hand on your picking hand’s forearm (pretending the picking hand forearm is a ‘fretboard’). Then, simply mime the fretting hand finger movements up and down your picking forearm – pretending like you are playing an actual guitar.
Visualize which scale shape you want to memorize and move the fingers up and down accordingly.
You can do this many times throughout the day (while waiting for the traffic light to turn green, while riding the bus, while waiting in line at the grocery store, while falling asleep, etc. )
This will add more practicing to what you’d otherwise do throughout the day and help you master this area of lead guitar playing (and play pentatonic sweeping guitar licks) much faster.
Pentatonic Sweeping Tip #2: Learn Proper Sweeping Motions
It’s rather hard to do pentatonic sweeping guitar licks without being able to sweep pick, agreed?
Here are the main principles of sweep picking to know for both the picking hand and the fretting hand:
Picking Hand:
1. Constant motion:
Your pick should never ever stop moving (both, when doing general sweep picking and when doing pentatonic sweep picking specifically). Your pick may slow down, but it should never stop moving and lose momentum.
Why not?
Improve Your Guitar TechniqueFind out how to play with better,
more clean guitar technique.
Watch Free Video Guitar LessonsLearn how to develop your guitar technique and build speed.
How To Fix Sloppy Guitar PlayingLearn how to play guitar cleanly
using this muting technique.
Because if it does, you end up having to work a lot harder to play through your pentatonic sweeping guitar licks by having to restart the momentum for every note.
This makes it much harder to play fast in your lead guitar solos.
Yes, I know I made that point in the video you watched at the start of this lead guitar article too.
But it’s so important, I'm mentioning it twice to make sure you don’t forget it.
And to help you execute on this point, remember the next idea, which is:
2. Push your picking hand through the strings (in a single motion) to ascend the arpeggio (and to play the first half of the pentatonic lead guitar lick)... and pull the hand back in a single motion (to play the second half of the pentatonic lead guitar lick).
This lead guitar technique rule is true no matter if you are sweep picking across 2 strings, 3 strings, 4, 5 6 or 7 (or more) strings.
Fretting Hand:
1. Separate the notes.
This ensures that pentatonic sweeping lead guitar licks sound clean and pro at every speed.
To separate the notes, release the note that just finished playing the moment you play the next note. This separation must happen at exactly the same time.
If you hold out 2 notes without releasing one of them, the notes will bleed together.
But if you release one note before fretting the next one, you get a sloppy gap of silence.
This ties into the next lead guitar technique reminder, which is:
2. Pay attention to (and master) finger rolling.
Finger rolling happens when you have to fret 2 (or more) notes on the same fret across several strings with the same finger.
This video shows how to do it:
3. The timing of the pull offs and hammer ons.
Believe it or not, ‘timing’ is a key element to get right when doing sweep picking in your lead guitar licks (and guitar solos).
And the part of lead guitar timing that many guitarists get wrong when they practice sweep picking is the timing of hammer ons and pull offs that occur in many arpeggio lead guitar licks.
This guitar video shows what this mistake sounds like and how to avoid it in your lead guitar soloing.
Pentatonic Sweeping Tip #3: Practice Pentatonic Sweeping On The Lower (In Pitch) Strings
Why do this?
Answer: this way of playing pentatonic guitar licks trains your pick attack and articulation.
As your articulation gets better, your 2-hand synchronization improves too.
And 2-hand synchronization not only makes your pentatonic sweeping guitar licks sound better...
It helps you use more of the lead guitar speed you already have.
True story to illustrate this point:
At one of my HESSFEST live events, a guitar player (Alessandro from Italy), got up on stage and asked me about increasing his picking speed, so he could play like Paul Gilbert.
But when he played for me, I could tell that ‘picking faster’ was the last thing he needed.
I told him:
“Believe it or not, if we increased your speed – you’d sound worse. Your REAL problem is your 2-hand synchronization. Pushing your ‘speed’ up will only widen the gap between your top speed and the tempo where your hands are in sync. But if you close that gap first and ‘then’ increase your speed – you’ll sound way more like Paul Gilbert and can use your speed in real music.”
I then trained him to quickly get his hands more in sync and within minutes – his top speed began to sound cleaner.
The same will happen as you practice pentatonic sweeping guitar licks on the lower strings of your guitar. For bonus points: use the bridge pick up on your guitar (flip the pick up selector switch all the way to the bottom).
Question: “Tom Hess, what if I can’t easily reach the pick up selector switch on my guitar?”
Answer: Reaching for the pick up selector is a unique skill you need to practice as you work on your lead guitar technique and practice your guitar licks and guitar solos.
That said, the pick up selector must be located in a spot on your guitar you can easily reach simply by extending your fingers. (e.g. The way it is on a Strat or an Ibanez guitar.)
If your pick up selector is located in a spot on your guitar that’s hard to reach without lifting up your entire picking hand, you may need to get a new guitar.
Pentatonic Sweeping Tip #4 Clean Up Excess String Noise
Heads up: as cool as pentatonic sweeping is... sloppy pentatonic sweeping doesn’t sound great. At all.
How do you clean up sloppy pentatonic guitar licks?
To begin, here are 3 common causes of sloppy guitar string noise:
There is noise from the open lower (thicker) string that happens as you are playing the higher (thinner) strings.
There is also noise from the higher (in pitch) strings as you are playing the lower strings.
(Then, there is noise between notes that causes bleeding, as we discussed earlier.)
How do you solve these types of guitar string noise when practicing pentatonic guitar licks and playing guitar solos?
The main techniques include:
Thumb muting – like the name implies, you simply rest your picking hand’s thumb on the lower in pitch strings as you play the higher ones. Your thumb slides up and down the guitar strings as you play guitar licks (such as the pentatonic sweeping guitar licks I showed you in this article).
On top of keeping your lead guitar solos free of string noise, thumb muting has another advantage.
Specifically: it puts your guitar pick in the best position for fast playing. The pick ends up in the ‘trench’ (space between strings) instead of up and away from the strings. This makes it much easier to play guitar faster because your guitar pick ends up moving much less for each note.
This is one reason why I recommend thumb muting vs. muting string noise with your picking hand’s palm.
That said, the key to doing thumb muting correctly is in holding the guitar pick a particular way.
Like this:
Next, there is muting noise from the higher in-pitch strings. The best way to do that? Use your fretting hand index finger to lightly touch those strings as you play the lower (thicker) strings.
As an additional precaution, you can also use the fingers of your picking hand that aren’t holding the pick to rest on the higher strings.
Between these 3 techniques for muting string noise, you’ll have an easy time doing pentatonic sweeping cleanly during your lead guitar solos.
Pentatonic Sweeping Tip #5: Don’t Neglect Sweep Picking – No Matter Your Style.
I find it amusing when guitar players say that sweep picking is only for “shredding” or “metal” styles.
Putting aside the fact that it’s hard to define what “shredding” even is or isn’t...
Sweep picking (the way it is used in pentatonic sweeping guitar licks) is a key part of directional picking. i.e. The picking method that, in my experience of teaching thousands of guitar players to play at a pro level, is the ultimate picking technique for guitar.
Sweep picking happens on many string changes when using directional picking... and everyone – no matter their style – has to cross strings while playing guitar, agreed?
Watch this video that shows how to do directional picking string changes the right way:
My advice: put in the time to work on your sweep picking technique and you’ll open up a lot of doors for your guitar playing.
Now that you know how to play cool pentatonic guitar licks, it’s time to improve your picking technique, so you can play all the fast guitar licks you want, cleanly and accurately – like a pro... impressing everyone who hears you play. I show you how in my free eGuide: How To Build Lightning Fast Guitar Picking Speed. Download it today and discover the picking speed secrets most guitarists will never know.
Transform your guitar playing with the best guitar lessons on the internet.
