Ever struggled to play guitar with speed and wondered if there was a quick-fix exercise to help you? Fact: there are tons of ways to improve your guitar speed in no time, but there are also a few bad ideas that actually hold you back.

Knowing which ideas are bad helps you avoid them and avoid wasting time practicing them/feeling frustrated.

Here are just a few guitar hand speed exercises that don’t work, and what to do instead to finally play fast like you want to:

Using “finger strengthening” tools or other gimmicks.

Don’t buy into the idea that using fingering strengthening tools helps you play guitar faster or better in any way. This is 100% not true and a waste of money.

If anything, it leads to the habit of potentially gripping the fretboard with too much force – making it harder to play accurately due to excessive tension built up in your hand/arm.

Guitar playing speed comes from mastery of technique, not strength. Instead of buying useless finger strength building tools, improve your skills in these areas:

Two-Hand Synchronization – This refers to your ability to fret notes at the exact moment you pick the string. Having poor synchronization between hands is one of the biggest causes of mistakes while playing guitar at fast speeds.

Picking Technique Efficiency – This refers to using the minimum amount of movement to pick strings. Having efficient guitar picking technique is the best way to play guitar fast and is required for picking cleanly at really fast speeds.

Fretboard Visualization – Being able to visualize the notes on the fretboard (in the form of individual note names, scales, arpeggios, etc.) is critical for effortlessly navigating through solos. Without good visualization, you make more mistakes because you get lost while playing and run out of ideas faster.

Ear Training – This refers to being able to hear notes in your head before you play them on guitar. This is critical for getting your hands to express the sounds you hear in your head without needing to search for the right notes for a few moments.

For help training these skills, find a great guitar teacher who specializes in teaching online rock guitar lessons.

Guitar Hand Speed Exercise Idea To Avoid:

Repeating a scale over and over in isolation from any musical context.

This is a practice approach that commonly causes loss of balance in guitar players’ overall skill set. You’ve seen (or experienced) this before: A guitar player practices playing scales over and over at fast speeds, but then has no idea how to actually use them while improvising or soloing.

This makes your speed practically useless, which is extremely frustrating!

A much better approach for practicing for faster hand speed with guitar scales combines one or more of the following:

·         Improvise with the scale you are learning over a backing track of one note (the first note of the scale) and listen for which notes sound tense versus relaxed.

·         Practice freely playing the scale in an improvised manner using different note rhythms rather than the same note rhythms over and over.

·         While practicing just a few notes at a time, create as many phrases as you can within 2 minutes by combining together bends, vibrato, harmonics, tremolo picking or any other technique. Then move onto a different set of notes and repeat.

Practicing with methods like these helps you not only get the technical/speed benefits of learning the notes of the scales, but the ability to use your skills to express yourself musically when it really counts.

This guitar speed video shows you how to effectively practice: