How To Get The Most Results Possible From Any Guitar Speed Exercise

Simply having a guitar speed exercise doesn’t guarantee that it’ll help you become a faster player – you also need to practice it effectively to squeeze as much out of it as you can.

Learn how to make any guitar speed exercise much more effective for getting results using these 5 tips:

1. Identify Its Specific Purpose For Helping You Reach Your Musical Goals

Practicing things with no goal in mind is a common mistake that leads to slow progress at best.

Determining the purpose of any guitar speed exercise you work on should be your first priority to ensure it is helping you achieve what you want in your playing.

Whenever you choose a guitar exercise to help you with speed, examine it closely to see what skills are being trained precisely and how this works into your overall goals.

Determine this by working backwards from your highest musical goal to see which skills you need to have to make it from one smaller goal to the next.

Then make sure what you are practicing helps with these skills.

 

2. Make It More Digestible By Breaking It Into Smaller Parts

Guitar exercises easily become overwhelming when you make mistakes and have to continually repeat the whole exercise. This is an inefficient way to practice.

A much more efficient approach is to break down your exercises into smaller groups of notes.

Doing this:

·         Helps you find mistakes

·         Helps you target problems more easily

·         Avoids working too much on things you’ve already mastered

For example:

Let’s say you are practicing a guitar exercise that contains 10 total notes.

Break it down into groups of 2-3 notes at a time.

Then play through each one individually many times. Use this approach:

As you improve on each one, combine them together until you are able to play the entire exercise at once.

 

3. Improve Your Playing Faster By Tracking Your Progress Consistently

Tracking your progress consistently tells you when an exercise is or is not helping you reach your musical goals.

Doing this is fun, easy and only takes a little bit of time.

Track your progress each week by doing the following:

Take any guitar exercise and play through it 10 times.

As you do this, see:

·         How many times you were able to play the exercise perfectly

·         How many total mistakes you made

·         Which specific notes causes you to make mistakes the most (and how many mistakes there were)

·         How many times in a row you were able to play the exercise without mistakes

·         What speed the exercise was played at

After writing down this information, continue practicing like normal. Then, in one week, check these areas again to look for improvement.

If you notice there is not much improvement in one area, make that your central focus during practice to strengthen it.

 

4. Use It To Train Your Musical Creativity

One of the most common mistakes guitar players make is training speed in isolation from all other aspects of their playing.

This results in lifeless, exercise-like playing whenever they attempt to improvise a solo on their own. Very frustrating!

Integrating many aspects of your playing into your speed practice helps you develop as a creative guitarist quickly.

With every exercise you play, make it more musical by:

·         Improvising for a few minutes using only the notes in the exercise

·         Improvising with the exercise over a backing track

·         Combining the exercise with other aspects of your guitar playing (such as scales, arpeggios or other techniques)

·         Create many variations of the exercise to turn it into 10 different phrasing ideas

 

5. Eliminate Hidden Mistakes By Working With A Teacher

It’s no secret that working with a great guitar teacher helps you become a better player faster than learning on your own.

One of the biggest reasons why this works is a teacher is able to see subtle mistakes in your playing that you didn’t even know were there.

This guitar teacher explains some of the problems guitarists have with building speed that they never would’ve thought on while practicing on their own:

Working with a guitar teacher to learn about these kinds of things saves you tons of time and frustration.

Find a guitar teacher to work with now and speed up your playing very quickly.

In the meantime, learn how to become a faster guitar player while practicing much less using this resource on how to double your guitar speed.