Want to play guitar with blazing-fast speed?
It’s probably best to forget most of the advice other guitarists give you.
Why?
A lot of common guitar speed advice is wrong and actually causes you to play slower!
The following are some of the most common things you hear people say about practicing for faster guitar speed:
1. Just Play At Your Fastest Speed All The Time
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.
2. Practice Slowly, Then Gradually Increase Your Speed Over Time
Everybody knows about this piece of conventional guitar playing wisdom, but is it really effective? In short, no.
Practicing slow can be good for learning the fundamentals of a technique, but is not effective for building really fast speed. Instead, this leads to sloppy playing at high speeds.
Why? Using this approach trains you to play with inefficient motion at faster speeds.
This makes playing fast feel really hard!
Avoid this by practicing things in groups of a few notes at a time.
Then practice these notes using short bursts of speed with a quick moment of rest after each repetition.
This makes your hand movement more efficient and makes practicing feel much less frustrating than it would otherwise.
3. Practice As Many Guitar Exercises As You Can Find
Collecting a lot of guitar speed exercises doesn’t really help you unless you know exactly how to use them to get the results you want.
Doing this is more likely to cause you to feel overwhelmed, leading to a lack of motivation to practice.
Instead, focus on finding ways to improve the synchronization between your hands so playing with speed feels easy.
Learn more about the easiest ways to master one of the most popular shred guitar techniques by reading this sweep picking article.
About The Author:
Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, recording artist and composer. He teaches guitar players from all over the world in his online guitar lessons. Learn more on the Tom Hess Wikipedia page.