Discover How To Use Guitar Exercises To Build Killer Speed

Knowing how to practice guitar the right way leads to BIG results…. fast!

However, most guitarists don’t really practice effectively and add many years of time to how long it takes to improve and reach their musical goals. Utilizing three key concepts helps you get the most results from your guitar practice so you become faster, play cleaner and feel more motivated than ever to keep improving.

Apply these three concepts into your guitar practice to build speed faster than you ever thought possible:

 

Concept #1: Stop Practicing Everything In Isolation From Everything Else

What is one of the biggest guitar practice mistakes that most people make?

Answer: Practicing everything in complete isolation.

For example, many guitar players practice scales by simply repeating the scale pattern over and over for a long time. Problem is, they think this is going to help them become better lead guitarist.

Yes, learning patterns like this is helpful, but playing guitar solos with speed and expressiveness requires much more.

Learning patterns in isolation actually prevents you from playing guitar solos with speed.

Why?

You aren’t able to adjust to all the variables at play while soloing in order to think quickly. Your brain has to spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how to phrase, what notes to play over a chord change or how to combine different musical ideas together.

 

The solution:

Focus on practicing everything on guitar in a musical way.

Take this scale pattern as an example:

Here are several powerful ways to practice this pattern to get much more results from your practice (in less time) to make your soloing better and your speed more musical:

·         Improvise using different rhythms for the notes rather than playing the same rhythm over and over.

·         Use sequencing to make the notes sound more melodic.

·         Focus on creating 5-10 short phrases using only the first several notes. Then continue doing this throughout the entire scale.

 

Concept #2: Integrate Techniques Together To Make Your Speed Flow Seamlessly

It’s easy to stumble and make mistakes if you only ever practice (for example) scales separately from sweep picking arpeggios.

Practicing this way forces you to stop and think about how you will connect different techniques and patterns together.

Practicing by integrating different techniques together at once makes your practice more efficient and helps you play fast and clean like a natural.

Here is an example of an exercise that does this:

Here are some more ways to combine different techniques together while practicing:

1. While practicing a scale, limit yourself to just one octave. This keeps you within one or two positions on the fretboard. Then look for several arpeggio patterns within this position(s). Then practice integrating the scale with these arpeggios while improvising freely.

2. Practice scales and arpeggios by finding ways to use picking, legato, vibrato, bends, tremolo picking and any other technique you can think of.

3. Improvise with everything you practice to work on using it musically in addition to mastering the basic motions needed to play it cleanly. It’s never too early to start using what you know in a musical manner.

 

Concept #3: Practice In Quick Bursts To Iron-Out Tough Mistakes

Practicing small amounts of notes in quick bursts makes it easier to improve your accuracy without needing to slow down.

This way you practice guitar at a fast speed to improve the mistakes that only occur at these speeds.

Here is the simple process for doing this:

1. Take just 2-4 notes of any given guitar lick.

2. Play these notes as fast as you can.

3. At the end of the last note, insert a 1 second rest to give yourself time to reflect on what you just played. This helps you identify mistakes.

4. Play through the notes again while focusing on correcting the mistake you identified.

This video demonstrates how to practice for faster guitar speed using this powerful approach:

This concept applies to anything you can play on guitar. Try this in your next practice session and watch how fast you get results!

The ideas in this article are extremely powerful for increasing your speed, but there is more! Find out how to literally double your guitar speed right now by checking out this free guitar playing resource.