Guitar Scale Speed Exercises For Excellent Synchronization Between Both Hands
Having perfect sync between both hands makes your guitar speed flow seamlessly.
Practicing scales on guitar with exercises that develop two hand sync helps you learn scales, solo better, play cleaner and play with faster more effortless speed.
Does that sound like something you want?
No doubt!
Good news is, you’re about to learn several guitar scale exercises that help you play fast and clean with amazing sync between your hands.
Let’s get started.
Practice On A Single String To Lock Your Hands Together
Single string scale exercises are a powerful tool to hand bring your hands together perfect sync for extremely clean and fast playing.
How does this work?
While playing on a single string, you are forced to fret notes at the exact moment you pick them.
With scales that move across different strings, it’s much easier to be slightly out of time and still get decent results.
Use this exercise to take advantage of the benefits of single string practice:
Pick the single string line in the tab below using heavy picking power:
Break the line into segments of 4 notes at a time, and play at a fast speed.
1.
Pick the first 4 notes 10 times, then the second
group of 4 notes 10 times.
2.
Pick each note twice for a total of 10 times (at
a slower pace).
3.
Pick every note using upstrokes only 10 times
(at a slower pace).
4.
Pick every note using downstrokes only 10 times
(at a slower pace).
5. Pick the entire exercise 10 times.
This kind of repetitive practice only takes a little bit and helps you lock your hands together.
Only Fret With Your Fingers When Necessary
Leaving your fingers down to “prepare” a note before playing it waste your energy and makes you playing inefficient. Your goal should be to fret at the exact moment you play a note.
This makes you more accurate while keeping your hands in better sync.
Work on only putting finger down to fret when a note is to be played as shown in this video:Practice this by taking any guitar lick you are familiar with and paying close attention to the movements of your fretting hand. Break the lick down to play it a few notes at a time and slowly go through it to make your fretting technique as efficient as possible.
Use Heavy Picking Power And Efficient Picking Technique
Picking notes with more power not only makes your playing more articulate, it also goes a long way to lock your hands together.
Why?
Because when you pick with power, you are forced to fret at the exact moment you pick – otherwise the note will be missed.
Watch this video to see a great example of picking guitar strings with power and authority:
Integrate this approach into your guitar playing as a whole to make it more articulate and synchronized between both hands by practicing just 10% of your practice sessions with heavy picking power.
Another approach that can be used as an exercise is to take any guitar lick and play the first note with heavy power. Then upon repeating the lick play the first and second notes with power. Continue this until the entire lick is played in this manner.
Practice Separating Your Hands Using Independent Practice For Both
It’s easy to overlook mistakes or poor technique in our hands when we don’t focus on the specific movements they are making.
This is why practicing by separating both hands is such a powerful way to improve.
Turn your guitar practice into an exercise by doing the following with any given lick:
1.
Fret the general area of the notes, but don’t
use legato or picking. Mute the strings with your picking hand. This helps you
concentrate on simply getting the fast movements down that your fingers need to
make.
2.
Use only legato to play the notes.
3. Mute the strings with your fretting hand and pick the strings you would need to play with your picking hand (they will only produce muffled sounds).
This kind of separate hand training helps you focus only on the movements of each individual hand before you bring them together to play a lick tighter than ever.
Use Clean Settings For A Short Amount Of Your Practice
Playing on distortion sounds awesome, but can sometimes mask mistakes you are making.
Taking the time to practice a little on clean settings helps you find where your playing breaks down and take action to fix it.
Result: Playing fast guitar licks with distortion sounds even better than ever before.
Plus, you don’t have to worry about feeling like your skills are at a totally different level when you play on acoustic guitar or clean amp settings.
Here is an example of how to practice guitar without distortion and improve your synchronization:Apply this and every other point in this article into your playing to massively improve your ability to play guitar with more speed and cleanliness than ever!
Still want to learn more about how to clean up your guitar playing and play perfectly?
No problem.
Learn how to play cleaner for free using the advice in this guitar playing resource.