Hey, Mike Philippov here from PracticeGuitarNow.com. In this video I'll show you a simple tip that
makes your sweep picking sound better and cleaner at faster tempos. One common problem
you might run into as you practice 5-string arpeggios like this: [music] is that it's
hard to articulate the lower notes of the arpeggio - the ones that are played on the
bottom three strings, like this [music]. Those notes in particular generally sound less clear
as the speed increases.
This happens for a couple of reasons. First, as you play faster, it's simply harder to
hear which notes are clean and which ones are not clean. Second, the lowest notes of
arpeggios are generally harder to articulate, especially if you use the neck pick up, as
you generally should when you sweep pick. You need to use very precise articulation
on those lower notes to make sure every note is heard clearly.
So how do you clean up the articulation of the lowest notes of your arpeggios? Well,
the most common way is to simply isolate the problem area and repeat it over and over like
this [music]. This is a perfectly fine approach, especially if you're new to sweep picking
and are just getting this technique down. But as you get more and more advanced, you
tend to get less and less out of this kind of practicing because you already know the
fundamentals of the technique. You improve the fastest when you practice the problem
area in a very specific context. So what you do is what I call "emphasize" the problem,
rather than isolate it.
I am still going to play the full arpeggio over and over but as I get to the hardest
spot of the lowest notes that need to be emphasized, I'm going to repeat them over and over several
times before continuing with the rest of arpeggio. Sounds like this: [music]
As you can hear, that's exactly what I was doing: I was repeating the lowest notes several
times and going all the way up the arpeggio, going all the way back down the arpeggio
and continuing on and on in that fashion.
This does a couple of very good things for your technique. First of all, it gives your
ear a longer period of time to listen to the lowest notes at faster speeds. This is very
important, because normally when you play arpeggios fast in the typical way, where you just go
through the notes all the way up and all the way back down, you only have a fraction of
a second to listen for the articulation of the lowest notes, and that's not enough time.
But here you have a lot more time to listen to the articulation of each note, you can
make some corrections in real time as you're repeating the lowest notes over and over to
clean them up and then proceed to the rest of the arpeggio and then descend.
And the second benefit here, is that no time is wasted practicing something in isolation
first and then in context later, you're combining both practice methods together to give you
the best of both worlds: you're fixing the problem and then you don't have to practice
in context later because you have been practicing it in context from the very beginning.
Now, don't get me wrong: practicing something in isolation is definitely important, especially
if you are first learning something for the very first time and you need to focus on the
very fundamentals of technique. Then you definitely have to isolate something and put it under
a microscope and repeat it over and over to get the fundamentals down. But if you already
have the fundamentals in place, and simply need to iron out a little mistake that you're
noticing, something not sounding clean, using the emphasis technique, rather the isolation
technique helps you get the result a lot faster. Another great application of the idea of emphasizing
the difficulty is to arpeggios that require you to roll your fingers across several strings.
Here's one example of such an arpeggio: [music]
In this arpeggio, I had to roll my middle finger across three strings, strings 4, 3
and 2. And if you play this arpeggio the way most guitar players play them, and the way
I just played it - by going all the way up, all the way down, all the way up, all the
way down, it becomes quite difficult at faster speeds to know when the roll is not perfectly
clean. It becomes even harder to know why the roll is not perfectly clean, and it becomes
almost impossible to make the right adjustments with your hands in real time, meaning without
having to play slower that are required to make the roll sound cleaner. But if you use
this technique of emphasizing the difficulty that I explained in this video, this problem
becomes much easier to fix. Here is an example: [music]
So as you can hear, I was repeating the rolling motion many more times for each full repetition
of the entire arpeggio. And this allows my ears more time to notice any imperfections
in my playing and allowed me to direct my hands to make the right adjustments in real
time to clean things up and to make things sound better.
And so when I go back to playing the normal arpeggio by just going all the way up and
all the way down, it's going to feel much easier and it will sound much better. [music]
So start using the idea of emphasizing the difficulty of your guitar playing problems.
And of course apply it to all context of your guitar playing and practicing, not just to
arpeggios or sweeping, but to: scales, scales sequences, chord changes, songs you practice,
anything you're working on where you have a problem or challenge, you don't quite know
how to solve. Use this idea of putting emphasis on the problem and you'll notice that it becomes
much easier to identify what is going on and how to fix it, so your improvement becomes
much more rapid.
Now there is another level of how you approach solving your guitar playing problems that
goes beyond the idea of isolation or emphasis and goes into the much deeper territory of
what I call "exaggerating" the difficulty. And that is where you have a problem where
you just don't really understand what is going on and how the problem even came to be and
what you need to do to fix it. And this is where you pull out the big microscope and
learn how to blow up the problem massively and exaggerate it, so it becomes very very
easy and very obvious for you to know what is going on, how the problem got into playing
and what you need to start doing to fix it as quickly as possible. And I made a whole
separate video on that topic of exaggerating the difficulty of your problems, which is
on my website it's totally free, there's a link to it on the screen right now. So go
and check it out right now and learn all about how to use this third approach of exaggerating
the problem that you have in your guitar playing, so that you have these tools: the isolation
tool, the emphasis tool and the exaggeration tool to approach solving your guitar playing
problems as quickly as effectively as possible. So go and check out the video right now, learn
how to use these tools, apply them and have fun practicing. I'll see you in the next video.
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