How To Effectively Increase Guitar Playing Speed Without Slowly Raising Your Metronome Tempo Over A Long Time

It’s commonly thought that the best way to increase guitar playing speed is to “start a slow speed with your metronome, then gradually play faster over time”. Although this make work somewhat, it is by no means the best or only way to play guitar faster or more cleanly.

The best approach for quickly increasing your guitar speed is to use multiple practice methods and strategies that challenge you to step outside your comfort zone and process notes at faster tempos.

Here are the reasons why the “gradually increasing metronome speed” method doesn’t work and effective alternatives to help you play faster than ever:

Reason #1: It’s Difficult To Identify (And Correct) Mistakes That Only Happen At Fast Speeds

It’s impossible to consistently play guitar cleanly at fast speeds when you mostly practice at slow speeds.

This is because:

1.  Your brain is not prepared for how fast your hands move, and is unable to process notes quickly enough

2.  You don’t know which mistakes you make while playing guitar at fast speeds

3.  You don’t know how to correct the mistakes that occur only at fast speeds

Instead of slowing increasing your speed over weeks or months, invest time into practicing guitar at fast speeds right away and listening closely for mistakes.

This way you are able to understand what to fix in order to play guitar fast without wasting so much time playing slow!

This video shows you a great approach to help you hear and correct mistakes while playing guitar at fast speeds:

Focus closely on listening to one note at a time as explained in the video while practicing any guitar lick, exercise or pattern you want to play fast.

Reason #2: There Is A Lot LESS Potential For Making Tons Of Progress Fast

Practicing slow and building up to speed makes it easier to get comfortable playing slowly, so you never end up pushing yourself to get better.

Many guitar players use the slow speed-building approach for many months at a time. Ultimately, they spend most of their time playing slowly, get bored, then try playing faster (and make a bunch of mistakes).

Result: Tons of wasted practice time, tons of frustration and very little progress because the guitarist was set up for slow progress from the start.

Instead, schedule time to push yourself to play at guitar speeds you aren’t used to. Even if you make mistakes, you begin programming your brain to process notes at faster speeds. This takes speeds that seem “impossible” and makes them feel much more attainable.

Good news: You don’t even have to wait a long time to increase your guitar speed to incredible levels. There are tons of ways to play at shredding speed right now.

This video shows you a powerful practice approach to help you play as fast as you want by simply using short bursts of speed:

Reason #3: This Method Does Not Train Musical Integration Or Creativity

Practicing guitar slowly and increasing speed over time puts the focus entirely on “playing notes faster”. Problem is, it puts zero focus on learning how to creatively use notes to play expressive music… which is the entire point of learning them in the first place!

So many guitarists make this mistake and end up knowing a bunch of fast scales or arpeggio patterns, but have no idea how to actually solo with them.

Don’t fall into this same trap.

Focus on using everything you practice by integrating it with other aspects of your guitar playing and using it in a musical manner.

For example: Combine together different techniques and patterns such as bends and vibrato, chords and lead guitar runs or scales arpeggios.

This video shows you how to combine guitar scales with arpeggios to solo more creatively:

Regularly improve using anything you learn by setting aside to create guitar phrases with it and play with it over backing tracks.

While practicing scales (for example), there are several ways to practice them to help you use them in musically expressive ways while soloing:

·        Create guitar phrases using several notes at a time within several minutes

·      Improvise a guitar phrase using notes from the scale while applying as many different techniques to it as you can think of during every repetition

·        Improvise with them over a drone (only the first note of the scale)

·        Improvise with them over a chord or chord progression

Using these practice approaches consistently ensures that your musicianship advances along with your guitar speed.

Now that you know how NOT to practice with a metronome, learn effective ways to get better with (and without) it by reading this guitar practice article.