The guitar playing community is full of well-intentioned, but harmful advice on how to play fast and improve your skills. Many of the common guitar speed tips you come across actually prevent you from becoming faster and cause sloppy guitar mistakes to creep into your playing.

Here are the top guitar speed tips you shouldn’t follow and why:

Bad Guitar Speed Tip #1: “Sloppy playing? Just keep practicing at fast speeds… Eventually it’ll just click.”

Continuing to play guitar fast when you are struggling doesn’t magically help you correct your mistakes. This advice sets you up for years of sloppy playing and frustration. A better choice is to identify the specific mistakes that are causing sloppy playing and work to fix them both at fast and slow speeds.

Look for fundamental technique problems at slower speeds and practice to correct them before re-integrating the technique (or lick, phrase, notes, etc.) back into your regular playing.

Also look for flaws while playing at fast speeds, then correct those flaws at fast speeds as well. This might sound counter-intuitive at first, but some mistakes only occur at fast speeds (not at slower speeds). So, slowing down to fix them doesn’t help.

This article explains the importance of practicing guitar to fix your mistakes at faster speeds.

Bad Guitar Speed Tip #2: “Practice without a metronome. Using a metronome ruins your creativity.”

It is a myth that practicing to a metronome ruins your creativity. Practicing to a metronome helps you keep your guitar playing in time whenever you play songs or improvise over a backing track. It also helps you more easily internalize complex rhythms.

Practicing with a metronome is also a great tool for tracking and measuring your progress with any given guitar lick or technique.

Bad Guitar Speed Tip #3: “Always practice with a metronome.”

On the other hand, when you only practice with a metronome, you may fall into the trap of constantly practicing in the same note rhythms (such as only 16^th notes). If you are not careful and you don’t actively practice guitar phrasing, this can affect your soloing skills.

Truth is: It’s good to practice both with and without a metronome. Learn more about the pros and cons of each by reading this article about metronome guitar practice.

Bad Guitar Speed Tip #4: “The best way to become a faster guitarist is to start slow and build up to speed.”

Practicing slowly and building up to speed creates several problems.

First, you end up practicing slowly most/all of the time. This means you never push yourself to play outside of your comfort zone and never get faster.

Second, you don’t learn how to fix mistakes that occur at faster guitar playing speeds. This means, your fast playing remains sloppy.

Third, you get used to using big/slow motions with your hands (by playing at slow speeds), that makes playing guitar fast impossible.

This video shows you how to practice guitar at faster speeds: