3 Mistakes That Make It Challenging To Play Creative Sweep Picking Arpeggios

Playing creative sweep picking arpeggios feels effortless when you avoid making these 3 common mistakes:

Mistake #1. Not Understanding How Chords Fit Into Certain Keys

Not understanding how chords fit into keys prevents you from soloing creatively with arpeggios. You must rely on trial-and-error to determine what sounds good and what doesn’t. This makes improvising very frustrating any time you want to use sweep picking.

When you learn which chords fit into keys, playing creatively becomes effortless. You already know which chords sound good, which ones create tension and how to use them expressively. This makes it much easier to quickly think of cool arpeggio licks.

Mistake #2. Not Mastering The Fundamental Aspects Of Sweep Picking

It’s a struggle to play great sounding sweep picking arpeggios when you haven’t mastered the fundamental elements of the technique:

These elements include:

• Being able to mute effectively using your fretting hand (this also includes using rolling technique)
• Being able to mute effectively using your picking hand
• Keeping both of your hands in perfect sync while picking

When you have not mastered these things, you face these big problems:

• The notes of the arpeggio blend together
• Sloppy string noise occurs from unplayed strings that aren’t muted well
• Notes are missed due to bad timing in one or both hands

Work on developing the fundamental elements of sweep picking at slower speeds at the beginning. When you master the fundamental movements needed to play accurately, playing fast and clean becomes much easier. Note: you don’t need to play arpeggios as fast as possible to sound creative.

Mistake #3. Having Only A Single Way To Play Arpeggios

Don’t limit yourself to only playing sweep picking arpeggios like most guitarists do: burning through them up and down the fretboard as fast as possible. This sounds cool sometimes, but quickly gets boring when overused.

Instead of doing this all the time, focus on making sweep picking sound expressive and musical. Here are just a few ways to do this:

• Integrate yours sweep picking arpeggios together with scale runs
• Add more notes to basic sweep picking arpeggios such as the 7th, 9th or 6th
• Play your arpeggios with more speed during intense moments of a song/backing track. For example: while soloing over the V chord in the key

Want to learn more ways to play killer sweep picking arpeggios? Read this article with sweep picking tips and make your arpeggios sound better than ever.

About The Author:

Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, recording artist and virtuoso guitar player. He teaches guitar players from all over the world in his online guitar lessons. Visit his website tomhess.net to get free guitar playing resources and to read more guitar playing articles.