3 Guitar Exercises For Incredible Speed And Accuracy
Ready for blistering guitar speed and impeccable accuracy?
No, this isn’t just for people who are naturally gifted at guitar or virtuoso pro musicians who practice 10 hours a day.
Achieving fast guitar speed is about efficient practice and learning how to dissect problems in your playing to quickly fix them.
So, ready to learn how to do these things?
Great!
Let’s get started.
Here are 3 guitar exercises to give you killer speed:
Guitar Exercise #1: Make Speed Easier By Breaking It Down & Getting Creative
Any guitar lick can be made much easier by doing one simple thing.
What is it?
Breaking the lick down into smaller, easier to digest chunks.
This keeps you from becoming overwhelmed by challenges and helps you focus more closely on the subtle changes you need to make to correct your mistakes.
Add some creativity into the mix, and any guitar lick becomes an amazingly powerful tool to help you become a massively better and faster player.
For example: See how the arpeggio pattern was broken down in this tab:
Now, apply the same concept to break down any guitar lick into several (or many) smaller parts.
Next, follow this process to practice and improve the lick while thinking creatively at the same time:
Choose the part of the lick you broke down that is most difficult for you.
Play through the lick by practicing with speed bursts as shown in this video:
Do this for 5 minutes.
Next, improvise freely using the notes of the part you broke down. Do this by using the melody of the notes as a guideline, while creating variations of it using legato, tremolo picking, vibrato, different note rhythms or any other technique you can think of.
This transforms your practice from simply learning the notes, to improving your creativity and phrasing ability at the same time. This makes your practice more effective.
Do this for 5 minutes.
Then, return to practice the part using speed bursts for another 5 minutes.
Continue like this with the part you are on or other parts of the lick until you have mastered them. Then begin combining several smaller sections together until you can play the entire lick all the way through.
Guitar Exercise #2: Increase The Challenge Get Bigger Results
Every guitar lick can be altered to make it more challenging, so it helps you improve faster. One great way to do this is to alter the type of pick strokes used in the original lick.
Repeating all upstrokes (or downstrokes) for every note for 1 minute straight is like charging up your picking technique. Once you finish, playing like normal is like unleashing a massive amount of built up energy to shred notes like never before!
For example, play through the lick below using whatever picking style comes naturally to you. Then use the indicated upstrokes only approach:
You notice a huge difference in the level of difficulty from one approach to the other.
Good news: Not only does increasing the difficulty make the original lick feel easier, it also improves your ability to keep both hands in perfect sync together.
Guitar Exercise #3: Pinpoint Notes To Make Them Perfect Using Shred Speed
One of the most frequently overlooked ways to perfect any single note is isolating it using tremolo picking.
This is like repeating a guitar lick over and over hundreds of times, except it’s just one note and it’s easy to repeat it thousands of times in just minutes.
Tremolo picking a single note within the context of a guitar lick is easy to do, makes it more fun and can be repeated over every note in the lick.
This video shows you how to isolate the notes of a pattern to improve them faster using better focus:
Now watch this video to make sure your tremolo picking is efficient for max speed:
Take any guitar lick you want to improve and play faster then use the isolation and tremolo picking approach above to isolate one note of the lick at a time. Proceed like this until you’ve played through the entire lick.
Combine the concepts of all three guitar speed exercises in this article to make even the most difficult lick much easier to master.
Keep in mind, there are even more ways to improve your lead guitar playing and play killer solos that impress anyone who hears you.
Learn these approaches by using the tips in this free guitar soloing resource.