Steve Vai style sweep picking exercise.

Steve Vai's sweeping technique often sounds much deeper and more developed than the average sweeping that's heard throughout metal music and neo-classical style shredders such as Yngwie Malmsteen.
I spent a lot of my early days of playing guitar wondering how Steve Vai got such a different sound to other virtuoso guitar players and it perplexed me!
This of course changed once I got into Jazz and other genres in which this sort of sound was more common. The incredibly fluid and decorated sound to Steve Vai's sweeping is the use of extended chords as opposed to the average minor arpeggios you'll hear quite commonly from sweepers.

Of course Steve Vai isn't the only guitarist to utilise extended chords in his sweeping, but it's a pretty good example to use!

Now, in this lesson we will take a look at one sweeping excersise which I have developed to give you an insight to this idea of sweeping with extended chord shapes.

First, here's a sweeping shape which is used in a few "Steve Vai style" sweeping lessons around the internet, it's found in the solo to Shyboy by David Lee Roth which featured Vai on the guitar, this sweep pattern outlines a Minor 11 chord (though I could stand corrected by some chord gurus!):

This particular pattern outlines a D Minor 11 chord, I would suggest practicing this shape up and down (and in different positions on the neck) as it is quite good for improving your sweeping, it also sounds very impressive if you're into flashy playing!

To finish off the sweeping excersise we will add a Major 7 arpeggio onto this Minor 11 shape:

This shape outlines an F Major 7 and is a very intuitive sweeping pattern making it feel a bit more comfortable than some odd shapes which are out there!

So the whole excersise will look something like this:

It's a very short and simple (if you're already comfortable with sweep picking that is) exercise, but hopefully it will spark some inspiration in coming up with extended sweeped arpeggios.

As with any excersise, try to implement it musically into your playing, move it to different keys, and practice it over a backing track to make sure it's used correctly!

I hoped this has helped and if you have any questions you can email me at rory.guitarist@gmail.com
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