The Art of Speed Metal Sweeping: A Classical Guitarist's Guide

Unlock the secrets of speed metal sweeping, a guitar technique that combines agility and precision to master arpeggios with speed and fluency. Ideal for both classical and metal guitarists, this guide will take you through the essential steps to elevate your play.

How to Understand Speed Metal Sweeping
Speed metal sweeping is more than just fast playing; it's about the intricate intertwining of both hands to execute arpeggios with speed and precision. This technique serves as a bridge between the precision of classical guitar and the raw energy of metal music, enhancing musical articulation through rapid, fluid sweeps.

How to A Form Arpeggio Allows us to Sweep
The A form arpeggio is fundamental for guitarists aiming to perfect their sweep technique. Its structure naturally facilitates the sweeping motion, allowing for a seamless transition between strings. Getting comfortable with this arpeggio is key to improving your efficiency and speed, making it an essential exercise for aspiring guitarists.

How to Achieve Efficiency in Left Hand Technique
Efficiency in left-hand technique is crucial for smooth transitions in speed metal sweeping. The focus should be on minimizing movement and maximizing output, strategically placing fingers to cover necessary notes without unnecessary effort. This approach enhances speed and fluidity, enabling the guitarist to maintain momentum throughout the sweep.

How to Utilize the Hammer-On Technique
The hammer-on technique is vital for executing arpeggios with speed and precision. By striking the string with a finger from the fretting hand to produce a note, this technique reduces the physical demands on the guitarist, facilitating a more fluid execution of sweeps and transitions between notes.

How to Master String Transitioning
Mastering the transition between strings is fundamental for executing arpeggios with accuracy. This skill involves precise finger placement and timing to ensure a seamless flow of notes across strings. It's crucial for maintaining the integrity of the arpeggio's sequence, ensuring each note is articulated distinctly as part of the sweep.

How to Practice for Speed
Focused practice targeting the development of muscle memory and coordination is essential to achieve speed in sweep picking. This involves repetitive execution of the technique, gradually increasing the tempo as proficiency improves. It's not just about playing faster but doing so with precision and control, emphasizing the iterative nature of practice required to gain speed.

*The following is a transcript of the Sweep Picking tutorial video:

Let me show you a cool or what I think is cool little kind of speed metal sweeping inve Maline type of lick which is a great exercise for both hands and for getting familiar with the a form arpeggio when you get this going really fast you can actually flub a lot of the notes if not almost every note and it still sounds pretty awesome of course I'm sure there may have been a couple that I flubbed at the beginning um if you don't know the word flub a very sophisticated technical musical term so this is a technique that we will definitely see in classical guitar but it's also a very metal thing because the a form arpeggio here's an a chord lends itself to playing this kind of sweep thing because of the way that it looks so here's an open a chord we'll talk about Minor in a second CU that does throw a monkey wrench into things and makes it harder but the a form looks like this and we have these three notes in a row in fact you could move just that shape around and you still have a major chord that's why slide players capitalize on this a form also because you got a major chord right here that you can slide around right well because of that it allows us to go and do a really quick sweep without having to do a lot of um technical stuff with the left hand so if we have the a form if you're new to that this is the the cage system that I'm talking about right um all these open chords that you might know c a g e and D are movable and then they can become minor and they can be the basist way of conceptualizing chords and scales all over the neck so if we take this shape up to here let's say here's a c chord now but it has the shape of a the arpeg would be uh the full arpeggio would be this you might see this written that's one way to do the arpeggio we have the root here the fifth is here we're trying to play if we're studying arpeggios we're going to play each and every note in the arpeggio that we can in order without leaving anything out so we could go all the way to the sixth string there's a fifth then we have the root then there's the third over here the fifth again the root the third the fifth but if we did it this way root and then get that third by hammering way out here that takes nothing in the right hand right so we can kind of get ready for the next string and then we'll lay these three fingers over now just that is [Music] enough so I'm really throwing my pinky here to get it to happen quickly and then I'm just kind of taking this and just barring it now that's the kind of thing that the classical guitar police will um come after you it will come to your home and arrest you if they see you doing that um but we don't care about that right we do what we want kind of a rock way to play that chord you can also do this but it's so much harder to line all these up also worth practicing but if we want to get fast we're going to go like this root third and then just lay these down fifth you don't have to worry about what those numbers are um got to know where the root is though third and then fifth and then we're going to stretch way out here and play a rest stroke on that final note and that's the root again right so we're going to go like this and do it whever you [Music] want once you get amiliar with it is actually not too hard to do at all so let's break this down into its constituent elements now again we're just staying on the major form of this so let's go up here to e then we'll go down to D all using the same a form right then C and then B that's almost the Andalusian Cadence the Andalusian Cadence we would have to start here on an E minor chord that's what ultimately we're going to do here E minor d right um if you know the song Walk don't run by the ventures they do that andalus and Cadence at the beginning and the first chord is Major um so if they can do it we can do it right a major if it were truly the Andalusian Cadence this should be minor um so if that's the case we can do it here not that we need permission from the ventures but okay so um what we're going to do here is we're going to break it down just to these three notes you might have seen this arpeggio before and then with your right hand grip the strings index middle ring all at once and then just roll them off now that might take a few months to get good at that that um that just that quick motion that I made and that's such a part of getting uh good and fast and comfortable familiar with arpeggios for the right hand that would be what we could call the forward arpeggio because if we're going um in the direction of the floor they call it the forward arpeggio index middle ring and just peel them off real [Music] quick and notice with my thumb here I'm touching these Bas strings trying to silence those doesn't always work but try to do that okay those were free strokes and then we're going to go way up here with the pinky and play a rest stroke with your middle

finger once you finish and complete the arpeggio with that final note see if you can touch all of the strings if we're because it sounds it's so hard to when the strings ring out it just doesn't sound right but um but we can't always do it okay that was with this fingering right but ultimately we're going to do this fingering so now we'll go to this shape except we're going to play it like this which you probably can't do um not because you're not good but because it's very very hard and weird I can barely do it um but what we're really going to do is is um take this finger off the instant that we play this string so that there's no conflict there right so we're going to go fourth string third string second string take your ring finger off as we play that final string and then of course we have our rest stroke there with a middle finger on the first string going like [Music] this okay let's add another note to that but it's actually going to be two notes because we have a bonus note with that hammer on and that's the beauty sometimes of hammer on and pull-offs is that gives you a moment in your right hand to kind of gather your senses or give you some extra speed so if I go like this I'm playing a rest stroke with my thumb I hammer this on that's a G sharp on the 11th fret it's just our arpeggio shape that we played earlier right and then my thumb having just done a rest stroke I hammer this on my thumb is ready to go for this thing and there is the whole arpeggio got to really work on silencing those strings that is

difficult okay okay let's try to move this down in the Quasi Andalusian Cadence thing so we're going to go seventh fret fifth fret third fret and then second fret okay so we [Music]

have kind of gets harder as we go to the left because as you know the Frets get wider apart and it's harder to stretch okay now let's make it harder by playing the actual Andalusian Cadence but all that really means is the first chord will become minor so instead of this shape that we had make that one minor but the rest ones thankfully can stay major okay but this is going to be way way way way way harder because look at this your pinky look how quickly your pinky has to come down before we had the luxury of just flopping that finger down but now we have to go and I'm I'm every time I do it and I try to do it fast but I I'm trying to hit all the notes I always miss one note or or another because it's so hard um but I think it's a great little dexterity practice got to practice it slowly but look what happens when you play it faster than you should but you just kind of get a little bit lazy on your left hand we can call go like this I mean most of those notes were just muted strings but as long as you can hear that first note and the last note and maybe one or two other notes um you kind of get the idea of what the chord is and so you can go of course I missed a bunch of notes there um but that's kind of you know um this is one of those things that that it's kind of fun to do because when people see you do it like oh wow you may have completely missed 75% of the notes but it sounds cool it's fast and it's got that that raking sound so you know this sound alone has a cool effect anyway so if we can kind of incorporate that in a harmonically sensible way um that gives him the sound of that I think it sounds cool and it's fun to

do horrible but good okay here's another way you can do it have a bar down already that does help try to form as much as you can of the chord and we'll [Music] go I think that's one workaround not really workaround because it does make it harder might make it easier for you I don't know and then we [Music] have real [Music]

slow really to make this happen we kind of have to Fan our hand out our fingers out like this so we can get this hammer on and we ultimately we're going to try to get up here the instant that you get here you don't have to be here anymore you can kind of scoot up a little

bit so there's this kind of rolling that's happening in my right hand I'm going thumb thumb and then really quickly peeling them off and then we have that and your left hand too I'm starting here and kind of doing this kind of motion like this you could say this kind of um weird kind of left or right roll it's really hard to to make the notes that you aren't flubbing nice and clear and not Buzz especially when you play it slowly so that's the other benefit of of Faking it and doing it really fast so many fun things to do on Nyon string guitar we can play ing style stuff we can do Metallica we can do James Taylor we can do whatever you want on nylon string guitar the world is your oyster speaking of Metallica in this video I show you how to play the master puppets riff for nylon string guitar