Not getting anywhere with your guitar speed? It sucks when you spend so much time practicing guitar only to end up in the same position at the end of the day. This makes practicing frustrating and de-motivating.

Fortunately, there are many different ways to move beyond this frustration and start making serious progress.

Slow progress with guitar speed is usually caused by one or two overlooked issues.

These speed picking exercises help you identify your issues to fix them in order to play faster and cleaner than ever before:

Train Yourself To Process Notes Faster So Normal Playing Feels Easier

Guitar speed mistakes are caused by not being able to process what your hands are doing fast enough to get them to do what you want. Your speed becomes cleaner by improving your ability to process notes faster through specific practice.

Exercise: Increase the speed of the lick you are playing by 25 bpm and practice it this way for 5 minutes.

This forces you to speed up your mental processing to try to play the notes correctly.

Even when you make mistakes, you are improving by challenging yourself to think at a speed outside of what you’re used to. Pay close attention to any mistakes you make (while maintaining speed) so you know what to fix while playing at the lick’s usual speed.

This gives you a sudden boost in processing power to help you be as productive as possible while practicing.

Balance Your Picking Attack To Improve Your Speed Picking Technique Fast

Picking with clean, accurate speed is a struggle when you have a picking attack that is out of balance.

Good news is, this problem doesn’t take long to fix.

Your picking attack naturally has stronger downstrokes than upstrokes. This creates an unbalanced picking attack.

Strengthening your upstrokes for just a few minutes results in making your speed picking feel much more effortless both:

Temporarily (for that practice session)

and

In the long term (when you practice this consistently)

Using extra power in your picking hand, play any guitar practice item for 5 minutes per day using all upstrokes. This will require slowing the lick down. Make it your goal to increase the rate at which you are able to play it using upstrokes only.

Then watch your guitar picking speed SOAR.

Quickly Improve Any Guitar Lick By Picking Apart Problem Notes

It’s easy to get frustrated when you aren’t able to speed pick a specific pattern with the ease and precision you want. Many guitarists end up practicing a lick/exercise/pattern over and over without making much progress… making the frustration even worse.

A better way to quickly improve the cleanliness of your speed picking while playing any given exercise is to practice by focusing on the main problems you struggle with. This puts the focus on just the notes that hold you back and doesn’t waste time on the things you’re already comfortable with.

Here’s a lesser-known exercise to use to pinpoint and eliminate mistakes that slow you down:

Instead of playing an entire guitar lick over and over, go through it two notes at a time.

Start by playing the first two notes back and forth many times. As you do this, listen closely for any mistakes.

If there are no mistakes, repeat the process with the second and third notes, third and fourth, fifth and sixth and so on until the entire lick is finished.

If you find mistakes, take note of them. After going through the entire lick, identify the mistakes you found and work only on areas in the exercise containing them. This helps you avoid wasting time by practicing the things you have already mastered.

Using this efficient guitar practice approach helps you increase your playing speed much faster than conventional approaches.