The Critical Mistake To Avoid While Practicing Speed Guitar Exercises

Does it make sense to spend the majority of your time playing slow if you want to play fast?

Answer: No. No, it doesn’t.

Practicing guitar slow all the time (while hoping to eventually get faster) is not a great way to quickly increase your speed.

However, this doesn’t stop most guitarists from using this mistaken approach to try to increase their guitar speed.

Thing is, slow practice can be helpful for learning the fundamental movements of a technique, but it doesn’t help you fix mistakes that only occur at fast speeds.

Plus, it doesn’t program you to process notes at fast speeds – making playing faster feel much more difficult.

Here are effective guitar practice approaches that DO work to help you increase guitar speed with any exercise you play:

Practice In Quick Bursts Of Speed

You want to play guitar fast right?

Good, so practice that way!

Practicing a few notes at max speed makes playing fast much easier, while helping you to correct mistakes without slowing down.

Watch this video to see what speed bursts are, why they work and how to use them in your playing:

Awesome concept, right?

Practice this right away doing the following:

1.   Choose any guitar lick or exercise you want to improve.

2.   Break the practice item down into segments of just 2-4 notes each.

3.   Use the speed burst method from the video to play one of these sections many times.
Continue like this from section to section until you’ve played them all.

4.   Now, combine multiple sections together and practice in the same way (with bursts).

5.   Continue this until you are able to play the entire practice item.

 

Train Yourself To Hear Notes Before You Play Them

Learning how to hear what you want to play before you’ve actually fretted the note makes playing guitar fast much easier.

This is because your brain already knows what to do, so there is less chance you will make a mistake when the time comes to play the note.

If you want to make playing fast effortless, you need to train your ears to hear notes at higher speeds.

This is a powerful way to hear (and fix) your mistakes.

Watch this video to learn how to do this:

Apply What You Learn Into Music To Get Better Faster

Practicing things like scales or arpeggios to a metronome outside of any musical context puts a limit on what you can do with your skills.

Fact is, you don’t just want to master technique on its own.

You want to master the ability to USE your technical skills to create amazing music.

Right?

Of course!

So, what should you do?

Apply everything you learn in a musical way so when it comes time to solo, you aren’t stuck because you never practiced “being musical” with your speed.

Here are a couple of excellent ways to apply what you learn into a musical context any time you practice:

1.   Practice arpeggios and scales not just by playing the notes of their patterns over and over, but by improvising with them, integrating them with legato, vibrato or other techniques, creating your own guitar phrases with them.

2.   Always improvise with the things you learn on guitar (every day or at the end of a practice session).

Now you have the information needed to make massive steps towards increasing your guitar speed and becoming more musical with it.

But did you know there is a way to play 100% faster while practicing guitar less?

Yes, you read right.

Learn how to play 100% faster while practicing 50% less using this free guitar speed advice.