Do any of you purposely practice swiping?

Playing Technique
#1

I was messing around with swiping, but I just can’t get my head around it. I get that you just push your pick through a muted string to hit a note on the next string, but my brain gets confused and I’m expecting the muted swiped note to make the pitch that should be the fretted note. Hopefully this makes sense!

With this in mind, do any of you have licks that you practice swiping or do you just play any lick that requires a two way motion and you play it with a single escape motion? How do you get over the mental hurdle of hitting a string but it not making the pitch?

1 Like
#2

I actually did have a thing where there were some licks where I should have been able to swipe that I would get mentally hung up on somehow.

My solution was to slow WAY down and practice mentally “bundling” the swiped note into the previous note, such as:

n x n → (n x) n
rather than
n x n → n (x n)

Now I try as hard as I can not to think about it and hope it works out. :laughing:

#3

so you’re thinking about chunking it all together? Say you’re playing 16ths, you’re hitting 5 notes instead of 4, but you’re mentally jamming them all into one beat and thinking about those 4 notes? I find this really hard to explain! :joy:

#4

oh no, what I’m getting at is that I don’t think of the swiped note as being a “note that is played” at all! If I do, I’m doomed.