How To Use Guitar Exercises To Build Up Speed Like You Never Thought Possible

There are many big mistakes guitarists make that massively slow down their progress with speed. Staying away from them helps you increase your guitar speed faster than you ever thought possible.

Good news is: taking on three key practice approaches steers you clear of common mistakes and helps you get insane results.

Read below to learn three amazing guitar practice principles for super-speed in no time:

 

Don’t Just Practice Guitar Exercises In Isolation – Apply Them In Music

Question:

Which athlete would perform better?

The basketball player who only practices dribbling and shooting by themselves in their driveway every day to prepare for a game.

Or

The basketball player who practices dribbling and shooting both in their driveway and together with other people in scrimmage that simulates game-like scenarios to prepare for a game.

Obviously, it’s the second player right?

Right!

Practicing everything on guitar by itself (such as playing a scale or arpeggio over and over) does bring some results for your speed BUT applying the skills you have into actual music as well helps you utilize your skills in a seamless manner when it really counts.

This is how you get “usable” guitar speed versus just having raw speed that can only be used outside of any musical context.

One great way to develop usable guitar speed is to improve your phrasing by improvising for 10-15 minutes at the end of a practice session. Improvise with all the practice items you worked on by combining them together, using them over backing tracks or simply creating your own guitar lick variations with them.

 

Practice Using Multiple Techniques Together To Get Pro-Level Skills

You make your guitar speed and musical expression flow effortlessly by specifically focusing on integrating different guitar techniques together.

Even better news?

This is super-fun and easy to do.

Let’s get to it with a few started ideas:

1. Practice scales by adding different types of vibrato to each note.

Vibrato is extremely underrated as a guitar technique. This technique is easily one of the most important things to master to make your guitar playing feel very expressive.

Usually guitar scale practice is done by simply playing through the scale over and over.

You can get much more benefit from your time though!

Combine scales with vibrato by practicing normally AND by adding different types of vibrato to each note in the scale.

Do this slowly. Use vibrato that is wide (note moves between original pitch and a pitch that is a whole step higher), narrow (half step) and create variation by applying it at a slow or fast pace.

2. Combine sweep picking together with scales.

Like vibrato, combing scales with arpeggios is an extremely powerful practice approach.

It helps you not only improve your scales and arpeggios, but learn how to combine them together to make your playing sound cohesive and more musical. This video gives you a demonstration of what this sounds like:

This makes soloing with speed easier because scales and arpeggios are no longer “separate ideas” in your mind. You begin to move effortlessly from one pattern to the next and your playing sounds very smooth.

3. Add tapping to your arpeggios.

Tapping is a great way to add lighting speed to your guitar playing while playing notes at higher pitch distances than you could normally.

Adding just a single tapped note to the top of an arpeggio sounds killer, like in this Am7 example:

The takeaway here is that combining different techniques and ideas together is critical for being able to use your speed in a fluent and effortless way. This is how the pros seem to play guitar fast with so little effort.

 

Become More Creative By Making Your Own Exercises (It’s Easy!)

Everything you practice on guitar can be made into its own exercise. By creating your own exercises, you essentially “teach” how to play any techniques or patterns involved.

This act of teaching activates your brain in a way that helps you master what you are playing much more quickly.

Use any combination of these approaches to create a guitar exercise from any pattern you play:

Break down the exercise into smaller sections

·         Use different note rhythms

·         Split a pattern in half and replace one of the halves with completely new notes

·         Play the pattern differently using techniques such as tremolo picking or legato

·         Shift the pattern to a different part of the fretboard

·         Combine the pattern with another separate exercise

·         Create 5-10 variations of the pattern or practice improvising variations of it every time you repeat it

This gives you infinite guitar exercise ideas to help you build speed and make your playing more musically expressive at the same time.

Now that you know some great ways to make your guitar speed exercises more effective, it’s time to take the next step: practice less and get faster in less time. Sound impossible? Think again! Learn how to get the shred speed you always wanted by using this free guitar shredder resource.