Tribute Excerpt - Sweep Picking Etude

Holiday greetings and salutations guitar slingers! X-mas is drawing near, and what says happy holidays better than a sweeping-frenzy? In this technique/song tutorial, we will take a look at an excerpt from the song Tribute off my Fretdance(2003) album. The song itself is a pretty strange mix of techno and shred, and the sweeping etude is the second part of ...

Alright then! In this first exercise, we will look at an exercise designed to help you focus on right/left hand synchronization. By keeping the pattern pretty basic, with no finger-rolls (more on that in Exercise 2), you will be able to focus on lifting each finger as soon as you've played them, to keep things clean and not allow notes to ring out together ...

Ok then, in this exercise we will look at another crucial aspect of sweeping, the finger roll. And no, this is not an appetizer you might find on Hannibal the Cannibal's dinner table. Whenever you play arpeggios based on the A-form, or E-form barre-chord shapes, you will have some notes being placed directly beneath each other in the arpeggio. To accommodate...

In this section, we will look at an arpeggio exercise that covers some wide interval stretches. This is in order to prepare you for some of the bigger fingerings occurring later on in this tutorial. This is also an exercise designed to introduce you to the quintuplet arpeggios found throughout the Tribute etude. Using 4-string quintuplet arpeggios instead of...

This part serves as an introduction to the sweeping etude, so just watch it as a warm-up for the next part.

Alright! Here it is, the big chunk of all-you-can-eat sweep-o-rama! This video is just the actual performance, so once you watch this through and get a feel for the piece, move on to the breakdown parts. You can also listen to the full track if you'd like, to get the the sweeping parts in context. It is in part 15 of this tutorial, but you can also use thi...

First breakdown section! All explanations will be found in the video. Please note that I wont go over every single bar in this piece, since much of it is just repetition, or maybe the exact same sweep technique, just a different chord. Rather I will cover as much of it as possible, without being repetitive.

Here is the second breakdown section!

Here is the third breakdown section!

Here is the fourth breakdown section. Get to work! =)

Here is the fifth breakdown section!

The sixth and final breakdown, and then you're done! Now, all you need to do is try these sweeps out in your own playing and improvisation! Remember, as always, learning something is just step 1. Application and implementing everything you learn in real musical situations is always the most important step. Now head on over to the backing track sections and ...

Here is the backing track for your practicing pleasure. This one is at 90bpm, so slightly above half-tempo. The reason for not putting it up in half tempo is that some of the note-values such as quintuplets would be difficult to get a feel for at such a slow tempo. But start out with this one, and move on to the full 155bpm afterwards. As you might have not...

And here we have the same thing in 155bpm, the original tempo. Get to work, and then listen to (or before, if you like) the original tune after that to hear it in context.

And here is the full original track from the FretDance(2003) album. Apart from the sweep etude part, it also has some interesting harmonic extravaganza that I might cover in an upcoming tutorial on harmonics. So stay tuned for that!