A lot of people get stuck in the Box pattern. It’s very common because it’s like our safe zone. If I could suggest anything to you, it would be to learn more modal positions. This will also coincide with learning more music theory. But if you look at the lesson of the caged system where papa gates talks about the C shape, you learn 3 different scale Patterns utilizing the same area of the frets on the neck. So although you might be staying in the same position, if you utilize each individual different scale you can get a vastly different sound. I did a improv using all these scales and it went from sounding country, to pop rock, to classical. I would also learn in the diagonal method of scale playing. It helps connect one octave of the scale to the next by moving up the neck. If you work on it enough you’ll be able to do a build-up run out of a scale in almost 12 frets. If you know your notes on the neck, and you know the notes in the scale that you are playing, you’re easily able to move up and finish the scale in a different position because you will know if you need to move up the fret a whole step or a 1/2 step. As far as sweeps go, if you are struggling with them I would also like to suggest you looking at the sweep pattern lesson on here. Understand that sweeps are very difficult to get in the beginning. You have to really let your right hand or whatever hand you strum with, you have to let it relax and it’s kind of difficult to do. What helped me the most it is to really kind of dig into the string to make sure I’m resting the pick on the next string and not just lazily slopping through it. Make sure you’re actually playing the string and dragging it across the top string and resting it on the bottom string below it before you move on. A lot of people don’t really play the actual string they just kind of breeze on through it and it has a tendency to sound very muddled and distorted. Start with sweeps very slow. You can either pick the 1st etude on here for sweep picking, or do an exercise out of 1 of the lessons and start super slow with a metronome. Please do it with the metronome! It’ll save you so much headache and bad technique in the long run! I hope this helps a little
I would also like to encourage you that all box patterns and pentatonic scales can be done diagonally as well!! Good luck, bro!!
