How To Increase Guitar Speed And Accuracy Using Better Two-Hand Coordination

Want to increase your guitar speed and play with better accuracy than ever before?

Work on improving your two-hand coordination.

Many guitar players think they are improving their two-hand coordination just by practicing like normal. This works in a mostly indirect way.

So, how do you improve it directly?

Here is one great way to do it:

Take any difficult section in a guitar lick, solo or exercise and double it.

This means you concentrate on only the weak areas of your playing and challenge yourself to get both hands perfectly coordinated. After improving your weaknesses, your overall coordination goes way up for the rest of the item you were practicing.

Result: Faster, more accurate and more effortless guitar speed.

Sound good?

Thought so!

Let’s talk about some ways to apply this concept to help you increase your guitar speed and accuracy in no time:

 

Lock Your Hands Together Using Double Picking

Picking every note within a given lick two times instead of one achieves several benefits:

·         It makes it easier to process what your fretting hand is doing

·         It trains you to fret notes as you play them (with better timing)

·         It improves your picking hand dexterity and accuracy

It also makes playing the original guitar lick feel much easier after you’ve practiced double picking for just a few minutes.

Try this with any given practice item you are working on. Double pick for just a few minutes then return to picking like normal. You’ll quickly see a noticeable difference in both accuracy and how much easier it feels to play.

 

Isolate And Perfect Challenging Notes While Skipping Strings

String skipping has the potential to be very difficult when your hands are not in coordination together.

Most commonly:

Guitarists are able to play some of a string skipping lick cleanly, but then get sloppy while playing the actual skip itself.

Fixing this problem makes the entire lick perfectly smooth from start to finish.

Good news is, it’s not too difficult to do either.

Increase your focus on the problem area (the skip) by doubling down on how many times you play this part.

For example, see how it is done in the tab below:

In this skipping pattern, the first note you skip to is double (shown on the right), before continuing the rest of the lick. This makes it easier to focus on the initial skip and master it to prevent it from ruining the flow of the lick.

As you skip strings, angle the pick in the direction you are skipping to in order to avoid having it come into contact with the string in between.

 

Practice Repetition At Faster Speeds Using Speed Burst Training

Speed burst training simply refers to:

1. Play a few notes of a given guitar lick as fast as possible.

2. Repeat these same notes again and again while inserting a brief rest at the end to give you time to process what you’ve played.

This basic approach allows you to practice and correct mistakes in your guitar playing without slowing down. This can even be done at speeds much higher than what you’ve ever played at.

The continuous repetition helps you get into a groove and really get both hands locked together.

This video shows you an example of how to apply this practice approach:

Here’s another way to practice this concept to increase the speed and accuracy of your scales:

1.   Choose any 3 note per string guitar scale you know and limit it to just one octave.

2.   Play through the first three notes on the first string using the bursts method from the video. Repeat this many times until it feels effortless.

3.   Next, play the 3 notes of the next string in the same way.

4.   Go back and work on making the transition from one string to the next smooth by using bursts to play the first 3 notes on the first string plus the first note of the next string.

5.   Repeat this approach until you are able to play an entire octave of the scale perfectly, then add more notes.

Good news:

There are even more ways to play guitar fast and clean than the ideas mentioned in this article.

Learn more right now using this free resource for perfect guitar playing.