Pedal Point Finger Speed Exercises For Guitar That Make Your Solos Sound Awesome, Improve Technique & Develop Musical Creativity

Playing pedal point licks are a cool way to inject speed into your fingers using fun guitar exercises. Alternating back and forth between a single pitch (using pedal point) gives your lead guitar solos a unique sound and helps you create interesting phrases that people enjoy listening to.

Exercise #1:

A key aspect of finger speed on guitar is using efficient movement and use of energy. One of the biggest mistakes people make while playing fast is keeping fingers on the fretboard when they don’t need to be.

This video explains in more detail why it is important to not fret notes when you don’t need to:

Practicing pedal point exercises is a great way to improve your guitar speed by making your fretting hand technique more efficient.

Practice this pedal point lick while keeping in mind the point in the video about only fretting while playing a note:

Exercise #2:

Training yourself to accent specific notes with a heavy pick attack improves your ability to play guitar fast and clean by keeping your hands in sync. A great practice approach to apply this concept uses a pedal point together with gradually increasing numbers of notes.

Here’s how:

Choose any note you want to have as the pedal (the reoccurring note).
Choose another note to play with it.
Play back and forth between the notes while playing the pedal note twice and the other note once.
Play back and forth between the notes while playing the pedal note three times and the other note once.
Play back and forth between the notes while playing the pedal note four times and the other note once.

Etc.

While playing the pedal note, use a heavy picking attack to accent it. This forces you to focus on play the note perfectly each time, helping you to bring your hands into perfect sync.

After playing through the lick by increasing the number of repetitions for the initial note, begin decreasing the repetitions until you are alternating back and forth between both notes. This adds a little more challenge to force you to focus more closely. Result: Even better sync between hands and faster, cleaner finger speed in your guitar playing.

Exercise #3:

Using a pedal point to skip strings and play octaves speeds up your fingers and gives you really cool licks to use in your playing. This takes your pedal point playing to the next level while improving your ability to play fast, clean and in sync.

Use the same previous concept of adding/subtracting notes to play this cool lick:

Like before, play this exercise both ascending and descending to massively improve your finger speed for lead guitar playing.

Exercise #4:

Another cool element you can add to pedal point licks for faster finger speed is guitar rolling technique. This means using your finger to play notes of the same fret on adjacent strings quickly (without them blurring together) by rolling your finger.

This video demonstrates the concept of rolling to help you perfect the technique:

The following lick uses the index finger to roll in order to play an adjacent fret to the one you start on much faster than you could normally.

Exercise #5:

Playing pedal point licks using scales is not the only way to speed up your fingers on guitar. Using arpeggios adds a new, creative dimension to this concept that sounds really cool and helps you develop greater finger dexterity.

For example:

Use this concept on all the arpeggios you would normally play for a killer finger warmup to help you get great results from your guitar practice.

Exercise #6:

Don’t just learn the concept of pedal point in isolation – use it to create your own music! Integrating pedal point licks with improvisation helps you master the movement needed to play them while adding more creativity to your playing.

Not only do pedal point licks sound cool, but they give you more time to think while soloing. This helps you make higher quality guitar phrases at faster speeds (because you have more time to think ahead of what will come next before you play it).

While improvising with pedal point licks, try this approach:

Choose any scale, then use the concept of pedal point to move back and forth between the notes of two adjacent strings. Stick with one note as your pedal and try to get as much expression from it as you can before moving onto another.

Before you know it, this concept becomes integrating into your soloing and you play killer pedal point licks without even thinking about it!

These unique licks sound very cool and are great for speeding up your fingers, however there are many other ways to gain speed on guitar. Learn how to become a faster player in less time using the ideas in this free shred guitar practice guide.