The place everyone should start. Three notes, one per string, on the top three strings — root, ♭3, 5 — raked down with a single motion and raked back up with another. There is no room to hide here: with only three notes the whole exercise is the rake itself and the fretting-hand roll between the strings. Get one clean triplet at a slow tempo before you even look at the five-string shapes.
Start at 50 BPM — far slower than you would drill alternate picking, because a sweep is only worth anything when each note stops before the next one starts. Play it one note per beat and listen for notes ringing into each other: that is the fretting hand failing to lift, not the pick. Raise the tempo about 4 BPM at a time only once a full pass sounds like an arpeggio rather than a chord. Press Play sweep to hear it and watch the rake cross the strings, or take the tempo to the metronome.
- Start with the 3-String Minor shape — three notes, one rake down and one back up. Do not touch the five-string shapes until this one is clean
- Pick a key, or move the root fret directly; the shape is movable, so one fingering covers all twelve keys
- Press "Play sweep" and watch the bar above the step strip: one unbroken bar is one unbroken pick motion, so the pick never lifts for the notes it spans
- Play along and let the pick fall through the strings in a single motion — it is one push, not several picks in a row. The strings do the separating, not the wrist
- Watch for the steps tagged "roll": that is the same finger moving off one string onto the next at the same fret. Press, release, press — if both notes ring together you get a chord, not an arpeggio
- Raise the tempo about 4 BPM at a time once a full pass sounds clean, or turn on Loop and let it repeat while you match it
About Sweep Picking Exercises
Guitar Tool Hub's free sweep picking exercise tool drills the technique that trips up more players than any other: one continuous pick motion raked across several strings, spelling an arpeggio one note at a time. Six movable shapes cover the ground — 3-string minor and major triads on the top strings, the classic 5-string minor and major shapes, a full 6-string minor sweep, and the symmetrical diminished 7th shape that repeats every three frets. Pick a shape and either choose a key or slide the root fret along the neck; the tool re-derives the fingering for whatever you are tuned to and only offers positions where the shape genuinely fits under one hand. Unlike the per-note arrows on the Alternate Picking Exercises tool, the step strip here draws one continuous bar over every unbroken pick motion — so you can see at a glance that five notes share a single downstroke rather than five separate ones. Every note that needs a fretting-hand roll is tagged, hammer-ons and pull-offs are marked separately from picked notes, and each shape reports how many strings its longest rake crosses and how many rolls it contains. Suggested starting tempos are deliberately slower than the other drills, because a sweep only works once each note stops before the next one starts. Where the Arpeggio Visualizer shows arpeggios spread across the whole neck, this drills sweeping through one shape at tempo.
- 016 sweep shapes: 3-string minor & major, 5-string minor & major, 6-string minor, diminished 7
- 02Continuous rake overlay — one bar per unbroken pick motion, not one arrow per note
- 03Fretting-hand roll points marked on every step that needs one
- 04Hammer-ons and pull-offs shown separately from picked notes
- 05Longest rake, roll count and fret span counted from the shape itself
- 06Movable shapes — pick a key or slide the root fret along the neck
- 07Only positions where the shape actually fits under one hand are offered
- 08Slow suggested starting tempos (40–52 BPM) built for hand-sync
- 09Adjustable tempo from 40–240 BPM
- 10Note-by-note playback highlighted on the fretboard and step strip
- 11Loop mode for continuous repetition
- 12Tap any note or step to hear it
- 1327 tunings · acoustic, electric & classical sounds
- 14One-tap hand-off to the Metronome at your practice tempo
- 15Free — no account needed