Guitar Exercises For Building Speed When You Don't Have Much Time To Practice
One of the most common problems for increasing guitar speed is simply not having enough time in the day to practice and get better.
Good news:
You don’t actually need to have a ton of free time to make fast improvement with your speed. The more you practice guitar speed exercises that are efficient, the faster you improve.
This means even if you only have 15-30 minutes to practice every day, you can still make insane amounts of progress.
What kinds of guitar speed exercises should you use?
Get started building tons of speed with these:
Exercise #1: Build Speed By Training With Short Bursts To Find & Fix Mistakes
Instead of playing an entire guitar lick or pattern, break it up into smaller segments of 3-5 notes.
Then play it as fast as you can while inserting brief moments of rest at the end of each repetition.
Watch how this is done in the video below (starting at 3:35):
This practice method is particularly good at helping you find and correct mistakes quickly.
Listen carefully for mistakes as you are bursting through notes and use the brief rest after each repetition to adjust and correct them.
Note: It is still okay to practice at slower speeds too. Use a balance of speed burst and slow practice based on how far along you are with mastering the foundational skills needed to perform a given pattern/lick. For more help with this, refer to your guitar teacher.
Exercise #2: Practice Combining Your Skills Together To Make Them Flow While Soloing
Combining different guitar techniques together helps you use the fluidly while soloing. This means you don’t have to stop and process different aspects of your guitar playing separately.
Result: Scales and arpeggios don’t just sound like exercises when you solo, they sound like musical ideas.
This video shows you an example of how to combine two different techniques/aspects of your guitar playing together:
Use this concept right away by examining your current guitar practice items or the things you play the most.
Look for ways to integrate your skills together while practicing to make them flow smoothly whenever you want to solo.
Exercise #3: Improvise Using Patterns In Close Proximity
Learning how to play anywhere on the fretboard is another critical skill needed for playing speedy guitar solos that flow seamlessly from one idea to the next.
The less you have to think about, the easier it becomes to play guitar with speed while creating great-sounding music at the same time.
You learn how to play patterns on guitar anywhere on the fretboard while making this feel like second nature by memorizing the way different scales/arpeggios connect together.
Here are some great ideas to help you do this quickly:
This tab shows the first 5 notes of three different scales (that contain the same notes):
These are called modes.
Simply understanding 3 mode patterns that are close by each other is the beginning to soloing all over the fretboard with speed and fluency.
It doesn’t have to stop there though.
Find arpeggios within these scales to integrate arpeggios and scales together. For example, within an A minor scale, you can find many different arpeggio patterns (without even moving to a different fretboard position).
Staying within close proximity on the fretboard while playing just a limited number of notes makes it easier to process everything without falling into the common trap of getting overwhelmed by too many patterns and notes at once.
Learn more ways to practice for guitar speed that can be used all over the fretboard and get better faster using this guitar practice advice.