Two Huge Mistakes Holding Back Your Sweep Picking Technique🎸🔥

hey Dawn here in this video we're going to delve in some sweet picking and I'm going to cover two very common mistakes that can hold you back when it comes to the cleanliness and articulation of your sweep technique so whether you're new to Sweet picking or you've been doing it for a while but it doesn't really click then this video might really help you out before I show you these I want you to realize that it's a simple fix but it's not an easy fix and what I mean by that is that while the techniques themselves are easy to implement it will still take a lot of work to really ingrain them in your playing so you will need to practice shocker I know right but you won't be able to just try this out for an hour and then be frank gamboli [Music] I'm also going to issue a little challenge here so I wanted to practice this practice routine for a week and it's not going to take you long but I want you to do exactly as I tell you to do it and then report back and see if your overall sweep technique hasn't improved a lot even within just seven days so with all that out of the way let's get going with the actual lesson all right so the first mistake has to do with the right hand as we could see in the previous screen and what the problem with the right hand is that a lot of people tend to separate the pick strokes and also have a hard time finding a good uh motion that works for their body so this kind of relates to the previous video about the speed burst stuff but we're going to approach it slightly differently and I always say that when you uh and this is when I talk to my students I want to speak to my mom she doesn't play guitar she wouldn't understand a word what I'm saying but when I'm talking about sweet picking with my students I always say that uh you have sort of this training wheels built in for sweep picking if you know what to focus on so what this is called is rest strokes and what it means is that you're gonna go from string to string in a straight bar like this so I'm just falling to the next string I don't separate the big Strokes right so that's a very important thing but it's one thing to know that but it's another thing to find uh what feels comfortable at speed so why I don't have any uh I'm not Amplified right now I just put the volume down here is you can actually hear just a guitar like this and also it's less annoying otherwise it's not nice so just turn down the volume on your guitar and then try doing this plant your pick on the low E string like this or you're actually on the screen now then you just let the pick fall like that so like a slow scrum like you would go as an open chord like that but we are muting the strings here so you do that first then you reverse that and you go the other way and if you're like most people you're probably gonna see that your hand is going to do this slant that chord Grady likes to talk about a lot and it does this natural it feels very unnatural to keep the hand like this and then try to go up as it feels equally on metal unnatural tab in the hand like this and try to go up like this so this part looks slightly different when you do it yourself but it doesn't really matter but if you do it this way you have to go do this first and you try to separate The Strokes you want to get if you have a six string guitar you want to have six separate Strokes and what I mean is a six separate notes not separate Strokes because that's what we want to avoid so but just let the pig fall and this is actually quite a fast sweep this is probably faster than you would need to sweep in any musical context right and the same thing goes this way and then you want to try to combine these two so you try to just find relax and try to find what's the smoothest way for your hand and your Technique because remember this has to work with your overall technique so you might have a completely different you know hand position than what I have so it will look different so you don't want to copy me necessarily you want to find out what works for your playing style so just do this for a while and you you can experiment and see like what works the best but you just look what we're looking for here is uh an as even as possible sound so you don't want to go right you want to go is trying to find that you get a type sound then once you find that I want you to slow that down and when you do that you're going to find that what you end up end up with when you do it slow enough that you actually end up with this rest stroke technique where you fall from string to string but hopefully now it's going to be in a more natural way and uh I'm saying this because this is what I've noticed in students where they start doing this I tell them about the restaurants technique and then they do that but very rigidly and it feels very unnatural but if I start them out like this they can always go back to this and that's what you should do so whenever you feel like oh it feels kind of awkward now when you add a left hand for example let's go back to this concealer okay what's the natural way to do this for my right hand and as you can see when you look at it this way when you experimented with it for a while you can see that it's not really a speed issue in the right hand when it comes to sweep picking it's actually more articulation issue with the left hand and that's what we're going to go to next but before we leave this right hand issue what you want to make sure that you do when you practice this is that you keep it to the same motion because I've seen this time and time again when we add the left hand and I'm going to show you two exercises but I'm going to show it in more detail soon but if you had just a left hand like this what I would see a lot with my students is that it would do this they would be fine doing this but as soon as they're out of the left hand [Music] not that bad obviously but it would be they would tense up and they would lose all like the natural technique in the right hand so that's why I think it's very important just experiment with this try to find what feels good and always have that sort of in your back pocket like you're a tool you can bring out to see that you're doing everything correctly so that's the first part so let's check out the left hand now all right so once you got the right hand going uh once this is you know rhythmically tight then you know there's a lot of different details you can go through in different patterns but once you can do this in time the right hand isn't that helpful in the overall articulation of your sound that's going to be a left hand thing so this is a thing that I've seen a lot of students get wrong and I got it wrong as well because I always thought like whenever I had an issue with sweep picking I would always look at the right hand and be like you know something's going wrong here this is actually something that I learned from Frank and Bali I'm watching his stuff we talked about the left and and articulation and as you saw in the clip earlier he's amazing but he so you should really listen to what he has to say so it's not only me talking about this and what you want to make sure when you practice uh the left hand is to cut the nose short you don't want to do that all the time so what I suggest is that whenever you practice something and I'm going to show you the actual exercises that I want you to to use for this practice challenge as well so the first exercise is going to be a three string exercise that goes like this [Music] and I chose this because you don't have to worry about pull-offs or hammerons it's all going to be all picked basically so this is the exact same thing I use for my students when they try to learn sweep picking when they want to learn sweep picking because you can just focus on you know however many notes you have an exercise that's how many knows they're going to be picked and there's all it's all going to work out perfectly with the sweep technique so you're not going to have any any awkward shifts here it's just going to be like a good good example of of sort of Ideal sweep picking patterns so the first one then is just this uh E minor seven so we start with this E Minor triad so we get nine on the G string then we got eight on the B string seven on the E string and we do that with three two one and this is going to be down down down then we have uh 10 on the highest ring and then eight on the B string again and seven on the G string so we got down down down up up so now uh what I'm talking about with the when it comes to the left hand articulation is to cut the nose short uh so that's not going to have anything to do with muting the uh strings with the right hand uh it's going to be just open strings here so to speak so we're not going to mute anything like that instead we're gonna cut the notes short by releasing the pressure in the left hand as soon as you play it so [Music] and this doesn't sound very nice when you do it especially with Distortion but trying to get it to sound as good as possible and so why this works is because when you play Slowly like this these are the notes my finger to the notes and then here we have the gaps in between it sounds very disconnected so but when you actually speed it up you're gonna remove the gaps and then also going to be the equal length so still get a sound very connected but it's not gonna bleed into to the next note so that's the idea so you control the articulation with the left hand so a good way to practice this then is to do every other rep for this exercise challenge that I have and also it will help you implement this in your overall sweep picking practice is that every other rep I do one short and one normal so like this so if I start with short I'll go like this [Music] so the way that I implement this in my own practice and that I suggest that you try as well is to do alternating repetitions so you do one short and then one normal one short one normal and it's important when you do the shorter you don't you know do anything weird with with the fingers or anything like that it should just be that you release the pressure of that particular note otherwise other than that it should be exactly the same motion as you do the normal playing meaning that you hold the note longer so the way that I wanted to implement this in your own practice is to alternate so you go one short and then one normal then when you actually practice you don't want to have the gap between repetitions once you ask for demonstration purposes so it's gonna sound like this I'm going to start with a short and then with a long [Music] and so on so the actual practice challenge here then is to use this one and then use this one [Music] want to move the move the starting at the first available position and then you do them twice in each position and move up a half step you do all the way up the fretboard and then you go all the way back again all right and when you go up to the top of the fretboard it's a good idea to start on the higher shape then so you basically if I demonstrate that here instead of starting here always you start on the top shape is that so you go but implement the same the same short long short long so short long [Music] so you get the idea and so the second exercise then will look like this where it's going to be basically the same thing as but we're gonna add the D string and the a string so it's going to be slightly different but you're going to recognize it as well so we start by going from 10 on the a string and then nine on the D string then we have seven eight seven so it's basically it's a G major Triad so and we're gonna descend yeah in the exact same way we descended in the first three string one so ten eight seven and then we just add this e fifth so nine and seven on the D string and the a string so ten eight seven nine seven then you just repeat that so you go [Music] and you do that in exactly the same way you start down here you do two one rep with short notes one rep with long notes move it up a half step repeat that all the way up and all the way back and the same thing goes here when you get reached the top you start at the top of the pattern and move down like that so instead of going you can actually change [Music] but of course you don't want to do it at that at that speed and also you want to make sure that you implement the actual point of this video meaning the short notes in the left hand so it's going to sound like this long [Music] foreign and so on all the way up and all the way back and here's a short thing about what sound to use when you practice this I would do you know your normal Distortion without the delay now I have some delay here but I wouldn't use that when I practice uh so just my normal Distortion uh and also not using an amp at all it's great especially for these shorter [Music] going between a short and the normal because the short ones sound really annoying when you use it with Distortion actually you get that [Music] but I find it's good to do both uh using a normal clean sound is also fine but I found that it's actually easier to get away with stuff with a good clean sound than what it is doing in it without uh any amp at all or actually using your normal Distortion so that's what I would experiment with if you have any questions regarding the actual sound that you practice with all right so the actual practice challenge then I want you to take this three string or patio start that at the first fret do short long in each position and you have to do it perfectly so if you find that you make a lot of mistakes you need to load a Tempo and if you make a mistake you redo that fret so we're really striving for perfect accuracy here and that might mean that you have to sit like [Music] and that's fine and another rule here is that you need to make sure that your right hand is doing the correct motion for you when you practice it so it doesn't really count if you sit like this even though it might sound okay because this won't work at speed so you basically ingraining a useless motion so those are the sort of ground rules here right so you go all the way up all the way back and like like I said before when you get to the top you change the direction of the exercise it's the same notes in the same order we are starting at the top uh note instead of the bottom note go all the way back and then you do the same thing with the five the five string pattern so exactly the same thing short long short long short long all the way up all the way back and making sure that everything sounds perfect okay and you do that once a day and I think this probably will take you maybe 10-15 minutes to do and if you do this and if you actually do this for a week I can promise you that you will feel a difference in your overall articulation when it comes to sweep picking so really give that a try all right so really give it a go try to enter this Challenge and get the practice in for seven days it's not a big time commitment but I think if you do it the way that I told you to do it you're gonna see a big Improvement in your articulation overall so give it a try and also if you have any questions just post them below otherwise I hope you like this one and see you in the next one [Music] hmm

Channel: Jon Bjork

Views: 7,816

Keywords: guitar lesson, how to sweep pick, jon bjork, sweep picking, sweep picking beginner lesson, sweep picking exercise, sweep picking exercises for beginners, sweep picking for beginners, sweep picking lesson, sweep picking tutorial, guitar lessons, beginner guitar lessons, guitar lessons for beginners

Id: 3bPVHzjlcO0

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023