How To Practice Fast Guitar Arpeggios For Incredible Speed And Accuracy

Perfecting sweep picking guitar arpeggios leads to amazing solos that make people’s jaws drop.

Good news:

Practicing fast guitar arpeggios is actually fun and easy when you learn how to master the basic movements and use effective approaches for correcting your mistakes as fast as possible.

Better news:

You’re going to learn how to do this right now!

Let’s get started:

1^st Lesson To Learn: Never Break Up Your Picking Hand Momentum

Breaking up the sweeping momentum of your picking hand kills your ability to play a fast and clean arpeggio.

Many guitar players do this without even realizing it!

Watch this video to make sure your arpeggios are clean by maintaining momentum at all times:

Practice to master maintaining momentum by simply watching your picking hand while playing the arpeggio. This helps you see the exact moment when you break momentum, so you are able to quickly correct yourself.

Additionally, practice with your eyes closed and try to memorize the “feel” of picking with a smooth sweeping motion. This trains you to unconsciously maintain momentum.

Develop Precise Synchronization Between Your Hands By Accenting Notes

It is sometimes difficult to play sweep picking arpeggios in perfect sync, resulting in almost clean arpeggios.

Lining your hands up in sync gets your playing on the right track and makes your arpeggios sound cleaner than ever.

What’s a great way to do this?

Accent the first note of the arpeggio using more power in your picking attack.

This video explains the concept:

Try this out now. See the tab below and the indicated note in the arpeggio:

If this arpeggio is difficult for you, break it down into just a few notes at a time at first (more on this in a moment). Work on accenting different notes to perfect the pattern a single note at a time.

Make Things Easier For Yourself By Breaking Things Down Into Smaller Patterns

You don’t need to practice 6 string arpeggio patterns when you haven’t yet mastered 3 string arpeggios.

However, you still get incredible benefit from this when you break down larger patterns to play only 2 or 3 strings at a time.

This video shows you how to perfect rolling technique to play adjacent strings within an arpeggio:

After mastering just one or two notes, work your way up to playing the entire arpeggio by adding one note at a time.

Practice fast Guitar Arpeggios Creatively To Take Your Skills To A Higher Level

Don’t just approach playing sweep picking arpeggios like they are purely an exercise.

This mistake takes away from the musically expressive potential of the technique!

Practice using sweep picking in a musically creative way to ensure that when it comes time to solo, your playing turns heads and sounds great.

Here are some creative ways to practice sweep picking to not only become more creative with the technique, but mastered it in fun, unique ways:

· Improvise freely with arpeggios in addition to practicing them purely as a technical exercise. Turn on a backing track that is made of just the chord from which the arpeggio is based. Then use sweep picking combined with other techniques like vibrato, tremolo picking or bends to make your arpeggios sound as musically expressive as possible.

Try this now for just 5 minutes using this lick:

· Practice combining arpeggio patterns with scale patterns so they flow together smoothly while soloing.

· Pick arpeggios with tremolo picking and heavy picking power. This often has the effect of making sweep picking feel easier when supplemented into your practice. It sounds cool too!

· Focus on both hands separately while practicing by only picking the strings of the pattern (for picking hand focus) or only fretting the notes of the arpeggio without picking. Then combine them together to play like normal.

Want to learn more ways to sweep pick better?

Check out this article about how to sweep pick fast and clean.