Advanced Lesson

Welcome to the second part of my short course on the sweep picking technique. As you’ll have discovered last month, this rather flamboyant technique is more commonly used by guitarists, although virtuoso bassists such as Billy Sheehan, and Adam Nitti have more than proved that it can be effective on the bass as well. In this month’s instalment, we’re going to be expanding on the simple arpeggios from last month. First we'll look at ways of playing seventh arpeggios over one octave, then we’ll play two-octave variations of all of the arpeggios.

Before we dive into any new material, let’s recap on the basic premise of the technique we're employing. There are two parts to sweep picking: sweeping,