A Closer Look At Sweep-Picking
(23 Sep 03)
General stuff and pick directions
A few words on working on techniques like sweeping: One thing that you should ALWAYS remember is: to work on a technique (pretty much any technique, although sweep-picking is one of the hardest techniques to learn) takes a lot of time.
People often look for shortcuts, or think "Hey, I have worked on ________ (fill in any technique you might work on) for 2 hours and it still doesn't work. I suck!"
Guys, it takes A LOT of time. It took me weeks to really get into the technique and execute it accurately. I spent several hours, day after day doing those basic sweeps in this article. And so did all the other guys... Petrucci, Yngwie, Gilbert, Jason Becker. That seems to forget that... but those guys used to sit down for hours every day when they were growing up, working on those techniques.
And that is something you should remember. It always sounds very easy in an article or interview... sounds like Shredder X is like "Yeah, I got my first guitar and practised a lot, then I played my first gig, then I recorded my first album".
This sounds like it took him a few weeks. But we're talking months and years here. And you will have to put in a serious amount of time to work on all those cool techniques. So don't get frustrated if it takes a while. Remember that you're on your way, and that you'll eventually be able to nail this stuff. It just will take some time!
Be honest to yourself. Don't cheat yourself. If it doesn't sound good or isn't executed accurately, slow down and WORK on it, do it AGAIN until it works. If you go "Well, no one will notice that it's not as accurate", you're pretty much teaching yourself bad technique, and once you get to the point where you go "Gee, I should sit down and eliminate those little mistakes till I can nail it!", you'll have twice as much work... you'll have to "un-learn" that faulty technique and "re-learn" it the right way. So, be honest and realistic and make sure it sounds good and is played correctly. Let's get back to our regular program now...
Picking directions
Another tough part about sweep-picking is when to change pick-directions. Because if you really wanna sweep up AND down, you have to be able to i.e. execute a d-d-d-d-sweep (sweep on 4 adjacent strings), and then "turn around" and move upwards again (u-u-u-u). Or, i.e. sweep d-d-d-d and then play the first note with an upstroke. Believe me, that takes a while to get used to.
One exercise that helped me a lot to get this to work was an exercise I saw Paul Gilbert do, both in his "Intense Rock" video and during a workshop I attended years go. Here's what it looks like:
This basically is an inverted C major arp (C-E-G, the inversion here is G-C-E, with another G on top). We start with the G at the 15th fret, high E-String.
It's played with a downstroke, and we immediately follow that up with an upstroke... actually a downward sweep, 3 consecutive downstrokes. Each note should ring out loud and clear, and each note should be in time... don't rush or drag. Switch on the metronome or play along to the ptb-file...
Here's the opposite one:
Down-Down-Down-UP. Practise those two over and over until you can do it. Make sure to keep your pinkie (which you use to fret the high G) relaxed. Don't HAMMER ON the G, fret it and pick it. Move this exercise up and down the string, too.
|
