3 Unique Guitar Exercises That Increase Picking Speed To Insane Levels

There are three little-known guitar exercises that increase your picking speed to insane levels faster than conventional approaches.

These exercises help you pinpoint your focus in specific ways to improve your overall picking speed, consistency and timing.

Result?

Your guitar picking is not only faster than ever but feels effortless and sounds amazing.

Get started playing with killer guitar picking speed by implementing these ideas into your practice approach:

Practice Every Note Twice To Make Fast Guitar Playing Easier & Cleaner

You probably practice most guitar exercises by playing through each note one-by-one until the exercise is over.

However:

Did you know you can easily make any exercise more effective for improving your picking technique and cleanliness by simply picking every note twice?

This works because it locks your picking hand and fretting hand together in sync.

You are forced to pay very close attention to the notes you pick in order to keep them in time and make them sound clearly.

It gets better though!

Picking with extra power in your attack amplifies this effect and helps you improve more quickly.

Tip:

Break down whatever practice item you are working on into segments and practice them in isolation from each other before combining them together.

For example, see how the tab below breaks down a scale into three powerfully double-picked segments:

This approach makes double picking a lick or exercise feel less overwhelming so you can concentrate even more on your technique.

 

Pinpoint The Beat To Transform Your Hands Into Rhythmic Machines

It sounds simple, but great guitar exercises are all about how well you focus on what your hands are doing… not just the actual patterns you are playing.

One way to increase your focus is to target specific beats while picking notes in a sequence.

For example: In a 5-note pattern, picking the 5th note with extra power every time it repeats. So, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.

This locks your hands together and makes it easier to think in the moment while playing at faster speeds on guitar.

Note: Picking in a sequence of 5 notes causes your pick stroke to alternate every time you pick the fifth note to accent it.

Here is an exercise to help you master this:

1.   Pick the open E string 5 times, accenting the 5th note with more picking power. Do this twice.

2.   Pick the open B string 5 times, accenting the 5th note with more picking power. Do this twice.

3.   Pick the open G string 5 times, accenting the 5th note with more picking power. Do this twice.

Continue until you’ve played every string, then repeat the process by moving from the low E string back to the high E string again.

Moving to a new string after repetition trains this skill from a slightly different picking hand position and makes your technique applicable to any string.

After this feels comfortable, move onto applying this practice concept with guitar licks, scales, arpeggios and other exercises.

Give Your Picking Attack Better Precision By Speed Picking More Notes At A Time

Whenever you tremolo pick notes, how many strings are you picking on average?

In most cases, you are probably only picking a single string at once (such as within the notes of a scale).

Here’s something cool that helps you pick faster and with better precision:

Don’t just practice tremolo picking single strings, practice tremolo picking multiple strings at once.

This gives the effect of making “normal” (single string) speed picking feel really easy.

Here’s how to practice this:

Create a short progression that uses power chords, like this:

Speed pick each chord as shown in the tab.

Repeat this for several minutes.

Then, remove one string from every power chord (leaving two per chord) and speed pick them again.

Repeat this for several minutes.

Finally, remove another note until you are only playing single notes. Notice how much easier this feels now?

Practice using this approach for just 5-10 minutes per day and your tremolo picking skill goes through the roof!

Now you understand some very powerful ways to speed pick faster than ever. The time has come to not only speed pick faster, but play 2x faster with everything in general. How?

By practicing less.

You read that right! Learn how to do it right now by downloading this free guitar speed guide.