Following most guitar practice conventional wisdom often leads to slower progress, formation of bad playing habits and lots of unnecessary frustration.

Yes, a lot of common advice regarding playing guitar faster is wrong and actually causes you to play slower and less clean!

The following are some of the most common things you hear people say about practicing for faster guitar speed, and why you shouldn’t buy into them:

1. Starting slow, then gradually building up to speed
Everyone has heard this piece of advice!

Practicing slow and slowly building speed leads to sloppy playing at high speeds and/or causes you to make very slow progress over time.

Using this approach trains you to play with inefficient motions when you go to play much faster. This makes playing fast feel like a struggle!

Avoid this by breaking the item you are practicing into smaller sections of notes.

Then practice a few notes at a time using short bursts of speed with quick 1 second pauses in between.

This improves your 2-hand sync at fast speeds, makes your hand movements more efficient and makes practicing feel much less frustrating than it would otherwise.

This video shows you how to pick faster with efficient technique:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzbQ4WFiJIE

2. Playing Everything As Fast As Possible

Guitar players generally make the mistake of playing everything as fast as possible without learning how to keep both hands in sync together.

Yes, this makes your hands move fast, but doesn’t translate to clean speed.

This causes you to make mistakes all the time, and playing fast feels like a struggle!

Instead, look for ways to train yourself to keep both hands in perfect sync to make playing fast feel smooth and easy.

3. Finding As Many Guitar Speed Exercises As You Can

Accumulating a lot of guitar speed exercises is useless until you understand HOW to practice them to get results.
Doing this is more likely to cause you to feel overwhelmed.
Instead, focus on increasing the top speed of your 2-hand synchronization and learn practice methods that make this possible.

Learn ways to increase the speed of your lead guitar technique in this guitar speed training article.

Author's Bio: 

Tom Hess is a guitar teacher online, progressive rock guitarist/composer and a touring musician. He teaches guitar players in his rock guitar lessons online. Go to tomhess.net to get more guitar playing resources and follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.