Synchronizing your hands is hard, no matter how you intend to play.

Sweep-picking demands synchronization, because it moves so quickly. To work on getting the two hands to play well together, you need to eliminate some difficulty for your fretting hand and focus just on the picking part. For this, you use shapes that do not make real chords, as shown in FIGURE 12-9. Actually, the shapes sound pretty strange; however, they do serve a good purpose: they let you focus on your picking hand.

Sweep-picking isn't like playing a chord and strumming though the notes fast. On the fret board, only one finger needs to play at a time, and this is where separation comes in. Essentially, you let your fingers roll from string to string, otherwise the notes bleed together like a chord, which you don't want. When you do this correctly only one finger is down at a time, and that finger should coincide with the pick stroke.

Both hands play a part in the muting process. (Muting can be used quite often, not just in sweeping.) To keep the other strings quiet when you're not playing them, use the fleshy part of your palm to mute the strings you're not playing. Proper muting is essential to playing with distortion and absolutely critical when playing with a lot of distortion. Your fret-board fingers can also lightly mute strings that aren't in play. Muting is a subtle technique that you refine all your life, so keep trying to quiet those unruly lower strings that tend to ring out when they're not supposed to. This will clean up your playing greatly.

One of the world's great sweep-pickers is Frank Gambale. Gambale can sweep just about anything, and his command of the technique will amaze you. Other notable sweep-pickers are Yngwie Malmsteen, John Petrucci, Steve Vai, Jason Becker, and Marty Friedman.

String-catching is letting the next string catch your pick after you move through the string before it. This also aids in the separation of the notes. When you sweep, put a bit of force into the string so you get a nice positive attack on the note. This hard click may sound bad when slow, but at high speeds it helps define the notes very clearly.

Practicing sweeping is unlike any other technique on guitar; it's much harder to play slow than it is to play fast. When sweeping is done correctly, it's an incredibly efficient and graceful motion. When you practice it slowly, it's hard to get a sense of the fluid motion, but keep at it anyway. While it may be difficult to practice sweeping, it really is the only way to truly become a great sweeper.