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Photo of Dan Mumm performing the Neo-Classical Sweep Picking Arpeggio Intro to his original song The Transience of Permanence

From Rock to Shred, the realm of electric guitar is inundated with myths and legends.

Some are just fun and some are useful while others are downright harmful to guitarists with real goals of mastering the instrument or going pro.

Everyone starts on guitar for their own reasons – and those motivations can vary wildly.

Many guitarists pursue fame and fortune while others have a grand vision of changing the world with their chops. It’s surprisingly rare to find ambitious guitarists or musicians who is able to stay driven by nothing more than their love for the music.

As you’ll find in most of the arts, most people start down the path in large part because of a strong and competitive desire to fulfill the human need for positive attention (and that’s no insult, some of the greatest artists and musicians have been more than happy to talk about it).

The world of Shred Guitar is especially competitive in this way as is fairly obvious by the staples of the genre.

One guitarist sees another guitarist performing something impressive, they recognize the impact, and become determined to master the same techniques.

As a result, Shred Guitar techniques are necessarily showy and designed to be epic and impressive.

Many Shred techniques are actually designed to look harder to play than they really are.

Add the competitive elements into the mix and it becomes clear why many guitarists do their best to make techniques appear harder than they actually are while ensuring that people think they’re too difficult to even attempt.

That’s one source of the myths about talent that are designed to keep people from ever trying.

The coveted Sweep Picking technique is a prime example of this idea – in several important ways.

Sweep Picking clip from my solo guitar composition “Micro Caprice No. 8 in F minor”

First of all, for the uninitiated, Sweep Picking looks impossible to play. It can be so quick and fluid that the eye can’t even track exactly what’s happening.

How in the world can you learn a technique at a speed beyond what you can even see? Well, that’s…

Illusion No. 1

Just like the mastery of any skill or technique, without knowing the process of going from beginning to advanced levels, there’s no way to understand how it’s possible.

In truth, when practicing correctly, progress is gradual but the progress itself grows in rapidity over time. That’s because of how correct practice both leads to stacking results and a constant growth in the skill of practice itself.

That’s right, practice is a skill that you will improve upon over time.

That means, quicker results through optimized use of your practice time.

But also, when you’ve gradually gone from low to very high speed, by the time you manage “very high speed,” your perception of what you’re doing slows down considerably.

That is something that you have to experience to fully understand it. But it can be likened to other events people experience where their perception of time slows down.

I can give a first-hand account of this fact. So much so that it’s even become a normal part of my career.

When I practice something for a large amount of time, slowly increasing the speed before recording a video of it, I’m always surprised by the actual speed of it when watching the video back later.

The effect becomes stronger the longer I go between performing the music and watching the video.

In fact, I don’t ever perceive the technique at full speed when actually performing it.

The point is that, like anything, you have to crawl before you walk and walk before you can run. You went through that process… so you can certainly tackle Sweep Picking?

Still skeptical? Read on.

Illusion No. 2

Sweep Picking is almost synonymous with blisteringly high speed arpeggios. The reason for that, of course, is how uniquely suited it is for playing arpeggios quickly.

But the simple reason for that is that arpeggios, like chords, can be most easily played with one-note-per-string on the guitar. That’s really it.

Sweep Picking is just another picking technique like Alternate Picking or Economy Picking.

It doesn’t need to be played at high speeds and it can be used for virtually any type of run that’s played on two or more consecutive strings, regardless of how many notes there are per string.

Because, you know, legato.

Example of “slow” or “slower” Sweep Picking – Progression 7 from Magnum Opus: The Ultimate Neo-Classical Sweep Picking Course.

Mastering Sweep Picking is merely a matter of practicing picking, once per-string, across two or more successive strings with a constant or fluid motion in one direction – down or up.

I like to think of this as being similar to clipping a baseball card to the fork of a bicycle so that it “plays” the spokes of the wheel as the wheel turns, creating something like the sound of a motor.

In this case, the baseball card is like the guitar pick and the spokes are like the guitar strings. While not exact, I think it’s a pretty effective illustration.

Illusion No. 3

Lastly we have the main illusion that not only prevents people from mastering sweep picking, it actually stops many from even trying.

What is this most powerful of illusions, you may ask?

“That Sweep Picking is hard”

Because, it isn’t.

It’s certainly true that, without Sweep Picking, many of the advanced patterns and runs that normally rely on it would be next to impossible to play.

But, you see, that’s what Sweep Picking is for…

While it may be a flashy, show-stopping technique, at the end of the day, it’s really just a pragmatic solution to the problem of playing certain types of patterns or arpeggios at a high speed.

It’s most similar to a common technique used on stringed instruments, such as the violin, to play arpeggios or other patterns of notes quickly and fluidly by simply rolling the bow back and forth across the strings.

Which, by the way, is one of the easiest techniques on the violin.

Of course you can find, write or learn extremely difficult patterns or pieces of music that utilize Sweep Picking.

But, on its own, Sweep Picking is a technique that makes playing certain types of patterns much, much, easier.

When first learning Sweep Picking, you obviously wouldn’t start by playing long, difficult or complex patterns. Like anything else, you start small and work your way up.

Once you’re working with the correct method of practice, nothing could be simpler than learning and effectively utilizing Sweep Picking.

Need to learn a long sweep arpeggio that you find to be too difficult at first?

Nothing to it! Break it into small sections that are easy for you and practice those first, combine them into slightly longer sections, etc., until you can play the entire thing.

That’s how I’ve learned and mastered everything that has ever been difficult for me, from Paganini’s 5th Caprice to the Sweep and Tapping “chorus” of my 2023 Neo-Classical/Fusion song “Birth of a Real Outer Space” (clip below).

And, as I always say…

If I can do it, YOU can do it.

Shred on,

Dan Mumm

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Sweep Picking is a technique that, to the uninitiated, appears to be impossible.

There’s a good reason for that.

Like most techniques, Sweep Picking is the solution to a problem of how to play certain things on the guitar. Or rather, it makes certain things possible on the guitar.

In other words, it looks impossible because, without Sweep Picking, it is impossible.

But there’s more to this illusion than simply the lack of information…

Sweep Picking, like anything on the guitar, requires a specific approach to practicing it to get the proper results.

If a guitarist tries to use brute force to get it down using advanced patterns at high speeds, it can feel as if they’re trying to smash their head through a brick wall.

If they’re able to make any progress at all, their end result will be incredibly sloppy and muffled – a direct contradiction to the purpose of sweep picking.

This leads many guitarists to believe that the technique is entirely inaccessible to them and it helps reinforce superstitions such as the idea that some people are born with a special “gift” for guitar and others, presumably like themselves, simply are not.

While it’s common for people to develop beliefs like that unconsciously, thankfully we can mostly dispel them by simply articulating them.

Saying it out loud is usually enough to see how ridiculous it really is.

The real difference between the guitarists who succeed at a technique like sweep picking and those who fail isn’t talent, but simply knowledge.

More to the point, it’s usually because guitarists draw the wrong conclusions about sweep picking when seeing it.

In reality, Sweep Picking is just a basic picking technique like any other. There’s nothing particularly difficult or special about it.

The confusion occurs for two reasons:

  1. Guitarists think of advanced sweep picking patterns, such as complex sweep arpeggios played at extremely high speeds, when they think of sweep picking.
  2. Sweep picking allows for things to be played on the guitar that would be impossible otherwise, creating the illusion that it would be impossible to learn.

For the first reason, it’s important to understand that a fundamental picking technique can be used to play anything from the most basic types of patterns to the most advanced. It can also be used at any speed, from extremely slow to extremely fast.

Just because a picking technique has been used to play extremely advanced things does not mean that it, in itself, is extremely advanced.

For the second reason, the solution here is just a matter of recognizing this illusion and taking the time to learn the fundamentals of the picking technique – which is not difficult at all and is even accessible to absolute beginners on the guitar.

Once you have the fundamentals of sweep picking technique down, it’s perfectly simple to start using it for progressively more advanced patterns.

As long as you start slowly, you can work your way up and master any sweep picking pattern, technique or style…

…but, like anything, you must first begin at the beginning.

Dan Mumm

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