Discover The Easiest Ways To Learn Fast Lead Guitar Licks

Playing a fast lead guitar lick over and over while making mistakes can be very frustrating.

Fortunately, there are more effective, easy and fun ways to practice fast guitar licks to master them more quickly.

By using the right approaches, learning any lick becomes easier than ever before.

So, let’s get started using some of them right now:

 

Organize A Practice Schedule For Your Guitar Lick

The more organized you make your practice, the more quickly you can master a given guitar lick.

Don’t just sit down and play the lick, get really into the details by being specific.

Here are some ways to do it:

·         Break down the lick into sections based on tough notes, techniques or phrases.

·         Set specific amounts of time to practice different sections of the lick based on which notes need the most work.

·         Set a deadline for mastery of the entire lick and/or different sections.

·         Use the concepts in the rest of this article to determine new practice approaches to schedule.

 

Break The Lead Guitar Lick Down Into Smaller Chunks

It’s much easier to master something when you are distracted by overwhelming information.

This is what sometimes keeps people from getting better on guitar – they become overwhelmed by practice and end up losing motivation.

Add on how fast guitar licks are often intimidating at first and you’ve got a recipe for frustration.

Fortunately, breaking licks down makes them easier to digest, more fun to practice and less frustrating to master.

Break the guitar lick you want to master down into 2-3 note chunks.

Then practice these short chunks at super-fast speeds, like shown in this video:

Try this:

Invest 1 minute into playing the first 2-3 note chunk of a fast guitar lick.

Then, move onto the next chunk immediately after.

Repeat this until you’ve gone through the whole lick.

Afterwards, determine which sections gave you the most problems.

Then repeat the process by spending more time on the challenging sections.

Once you’ve mastered these short chunks in isolation, begin combing them together until you are able to play the entire guitar lick up to speed all the way through.

 

Make It Easier By Making It Harder

Making things harder to play forces you to step outside of your comfort zone. Applying this concept while playing a guitar lick helps you get better quickly.

What are some ways to do this?

Here are three:

1. Practice them by using all upstrokes.

Using only upstrokes strengthens the half of your picking technique that is naturally weaker (the other half being downstrokes). This makes picking using down and upstrokes feel easier.

For example: Try the fast guitar lick in the tab below by playing it using the pick attack you’d normally use. Then try only upstrokes (at a slower speed) for a few minutes:

After coming back to play the lick like normal, it becomes easier by contrast.

2. Double pick the notes.

Picking every note twice in a guitar lick forces you to keep both hands in perfect sync together.

Locking your hands together in this manner makes playing the lick like normal feel easier because it effectively “warms up” both your hands and your mind.

3. Play the guitar lick at faster tempo.

Playing at speeds that are faster than what you are used to tells your mind, “Yes, I really can do this.” This is the first step in overcoming speed plateaus. Try playing a fast guitar lick much faster than normal and don’t worry about making mistakes. After doing this for a bit, playing at the normal tempo suddenly feels a little easier and less intimidating.

Learn more ways to overcome plateaus in your guitar speed.