Advanced Sweep Concepts

In this guest author guitar lesson, John Huldt will show you some advanced sweep concepts.

When I was a student at LA Music Academy I was fortunate enough to take lessons from Frank Gambale. He has taken the sweep picking technique to a whole new dimension and this lesson is definitely inspired by his way of playing. What I've done here is that I've taken Gambale style sweep concepts and put them in a more neoclassical style (which we all know and love). I typed out all the up and down strokes for clarity. 

The chord progression is something I stumbled upon one day noodleling around on the guitar. It's a descending bass line that I added some fancy chords to (how about the Bbmaj7#11 and D#min7b5/F#) and out it came sounding like Beethoven or something. I even stole one of Ludwig Van's old tricks by playing the chord as a whole note on the first beat of every bar and repeating the bass note on every quarter note. 

I then added the triplet solo part which basically plays off of every chord and also adding some interesting notes (for color as the jazz cats would say) like b9 and #5 and so on. Note on the diminished chords that I use more notes from the whole half diminished scale than just the obvious diminished triads (like that other famous Swedish guitar player. Yngwie Malmsteen... :-) and this again to add a little spunk to it.

When I composed the solo guitar I'd let the pick kind of steer the way to make it as sweepable as possible (much in the veins of Gambale) and hopefully this can make you, brave guitarist, find some new, cool ways of using the technique.