Develop your speed and mastery of the fretboard by using these sweep-picking techniques. Sweep picking means playing multiple notes in the same stroke, one on each string. This can greatly increase your speed and open your playing up to new melodic possibilities.
Arpeggio play in a hard rock/metal context began decades ago when European guitar masters Ritchie Blackmore, Uli Jon Roth, Gary Moore, and Michael Schenker added two- and three-string arpeggio shapes to their solos. Several years later, two of shred guitar’s founding fathers—Yngwie Malmsteen and Michael Angelo Batio—significantly expanded the boundaries of arpeggio play, and the technique we’ve come to know as sweep picking was born.
Joe Stump takes you through all of it with studies, etudes, and track excerpts ranging from the basic aspects of arpeggio play to some of the most technically intense sweep-picking material you’ll ever encounter.
Sweep picking and arpeggio play are among the most useful hard rock/metal/shred techniques, though they are also applicable to any style. These demonstrations, exercises, etudes, and play-along tracks will help you master sweeping. Online audio tracks let you practice them with a full band, in real musical settings. Tablature is included. 112 pages.
You will learn:
- Techniques for sweep-picking across two, three, four, five, and six strings
- Shapes and patterns for sweep picking and arpeggio play
- Broken-arpeggio patterns
- Voicings for chords that are most useful for sweep picking, as well as their related scales
- Studies for playing arpeggios while skipping strings
- Etudes for applying these techniques to musical contexts
- Excerpts from Stump’s Speed Metal Messiah, Revenge of the Shredlord, The Dark Lord Rises, and others, that illustrate these techniques
Joe Stump is a master of full-throttle, neo-classical shred/speed metal guitar, and is considered among the fastest guitarists of all time. He is an associate professor of guitar at Berklee College of Music, where he has taught since 1995.
