How to Sweep Pick on Guitar

This is an advanced guitarist technique, don’t take it lightly, it will take a very long time to learn correctly. It’ll be tedious boring practice hour after hour, but the end results are more than worth it to finally be able to sound like “that one song” by “that one guy.” The basic idea is to sweep your pick across the strings an make your left hand move at the same speed while only having a single note ring at the same time, it’s an arpeggio practically, except only 1 note can ring at a time.

First step- right hand

The right hand is very important In this technique, basically you want to sweep across the strings going down and up as smoothly as possible, just practice picking the g, b, and high e string without lifting your pick away from the strings, but rather have it be a very smooth continuous motion, then when you get to the high e string you have to pluck it on your way up again, then just go back to the g string, but only pluck it once, then back to the b string so the order would be g b e e b g b e e b g just repeat that patern.

Second step- left hand

For the right hand you can practice without picking any strings but a basic three string sweep you can start on any feet but for this example we’ll use a three string sweep of a c chord and for this you start on the g string with your index finger on the 12th fret. The second note is the b string on the 13th fret with your middle finger, make sure your index finger is picked up when your middle finger is hitting the 13th fret. The next part is the trickiest part for the right hand, but you must hit the 12th fret on the e string and then the 15th fret on the same string with your pinky, then pull off to the 12th fret again on the e string. They all must be equal length every single note, if the are not it will sound very sloppy. The pattern is 12th on g, 13th on b, 12th on the e, 15th on the e, pull off to 12th on e, then back to 13th on b. Repeat that over and over again for your right hand.