Time to Burn with Michael Angelo Batio: Applying Sweep Picking to Chord Progressions, Part 2

Last month, I introduced the concept of applying different sweep-picked arpeggio shapes to a series of chords within a repeating progression.

This month, I’d like to expand our view to a greater variety of sweep-picked shapes, as well as a more complex, ambitious chord progression.

To quickly review, a sweep—also often referred to as a rake—is the term used to describe dragging the pick across a series of adjacent strings in a single stroke, either a downstroke or an upstroke. Ascending melodies are played with downstroke sweeps and descending melodies are played with upstroke sweeps.

Sweep picking is the most effective guitar technique for replicating the fast arpeggio-based lines often heard in classical piano and violin music. Johann Sebastian Bach, for example, composed a suite of musical etudes (exercises) for violinists called the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, many of which feature long passages of arpeggios that melodically outline a chord progression using only single notes, with no accompaniment.

A common progression heard in these pieces is one that moves through the cycle of fourths.

FIGURE 1 offers a seven-bar exercise that does this in the key of D minor: starting on Dm, the progression moves up a fourth to Gm, followed by C, F, and Bb, each arpeggio being rooted a fourth above (or a fifth below) the previous chord. In bar 6, I move from Bb down to A7b9 as a means to set up a V-i (five to one-minor) resolution back to Dm. This A7b9 chord may also be analyzed as Edim7, Gdim7, Bbdim7 or C#dim7, superimposed over an A root note. Once I resolve the diminished-type sound of A7b9 to A major, I then resolve back to Dm.

For virtually every chord in the progression, a sweep arpeggio based on a