How To Practice Lead Guitar Exercises For Speed That Breaks The Sound Barrier
Playing fast lead guitar exercises over and over doesn’t make you a faster guitarist. Knowing how to practice lead guitar exercises effectively does, and it’s not very hard to do either. When you practice effectively, you save tons of wasted time and improve much faster than others who don’t really practice with specific goals in mind.
Here are many ways to practice for faster guitar speed, less mistakes and more productive practice sessions:
Apply the practice approaches below using the tab below as an example lick to work with.
How To Practice Lead Guitar Exercises To Quickly Fix Mistakes
Play through the lick in the tab and pay attention to the notes that you miss or that don’t sound perfect when you play them. This tells you where you need to focus your attention to play the lick perfectly.
Most guitarists attempt to fix mistakes by playing the entire lick over and over. Don’t make this same mistake!
Focus your attention specifically on the notes you are struggling with and practice them 25, 50 or 100 times to iron-out your mistakes. This sounds like a lot, but only takes five or ten minutes at most.
Once you’ve fixed the problem, add some surrounding notes from the lick and play them together. If there are no problems now, add the notes you fixed back into the lick and play everything to see how it sounds.
Using this approach of isolating problems in your playing fixes your problems in the most efficient way possible. This helps you play with fast and clean speed that feels effortless.How To Practice Lead Guitar Exercises To Increase Your Top Playing Speed
It’s easy to get used to playing guitar in the same way over and over when you’ve been playing for years. This is how many guitarists get stuck at the same speed and can’t seem to get faster.
Increasing your guitar speed requires challenging yourself to think at faster speeds.
For example: You may be able to play the scale portion of the tab fast, but you will not play it any faster until you push yourself beyond your comfort zone.
Find your max guitar speed for playing note #8 through the end of the exercise. Do this by using a metronome, seeing the speed at which you start to make many mistakes and reducing that speed by 10-15 beats per minute.
Let’s say your max speed is 150 bpm. Playing clean at 175 bpm doesn’t happen by always playing at 150, or slowing way down and gradually working your way up. Instead, try turning the metronome up to 185. Then allow yourself to make mistakes, but focus on trying to process what your hands are doing at this speed.
Once you turn the metronome back down, it becomes easier to process what your hands are doing. This helps you close the gap between where your speed is at now and where you want it to be.How To Practice Lead Guitar Exercises To Integrate Your Speed Into Music
Don’t make the common mistake of only practicing lead guitar exercises such as scales or arpeggio patterns in total isolation from all other aspects of your playing. Playing guitar is about musical expression and using your skills in actual music is critical for getting the most benefit from any guitar speed you have.
The tab in this article is a great example of learning to use your speed musically. It combines two different areas of guitar playing together (sweep picking arpeggios and scales), rather than having them be in isolation.
This video demonstrates an excellent way to combine sweep picking with scales:Here are some other great ways to integrate your guitar speed into other areas of your playing to become a better overall musician:
·
Practice playing scales by improvising phrases
with them rather than only playing them with the same note rhythms over and
over
·
Create short chord progressions while practicing
sweep picking arpeggios to engage your mind to think more creatively
How To Practice Lead Guitar Exercises To Play Longer Without Making Mistakes
People are not often aware of the importance of being able to practice endurance for guitar. Being able to play guitar for longer periods of time without making mistakes helps you stand head and shoulders above most guitarists.
Practice for endurance and consistency in your lead guitar playing by seeing how many mistakes you make with the tab above while playing it continuously for 30 seconds. Then rest, and see if you can make less the next try. Once you are able to play it without mistakes for 30 seconds… you know you’re locked in!
Apply this same concept in a different way by trying to play any given lick 10, 15 or 20 times in a row without mistakes.
Remember, most guitarists only try to play something perfectly once and feel satisfied with that. Being able to play something consistently perfect puts your skills on a whole other level.
How To Practice Lead Guitar Exercises To
Find New Ways To Improve That You Never Thought Of Before
You don’t know what you don’t know. And when you don’t know how to improve your guitar playing, your progress stalls. Good news is, there are many ways to challenge yourself to expose weaknesses so you know exactly what to practice to get better.
Here is one great example to try right now:
Practice the tab on this page using extra power in your picking attack. This forces you to play with both hands in perfect sync, otherwise you begin making mistakes. This tells you how tightly in sync your hands are and which notes you struggle to play so you know what to focus on.
Emphasize upstrokes with power, and downstrokes like normal to improve your ability to focus closely and process notes at faster speeds.
There are countless other ways to test your guitar playing, but the best approach is to simply work with a guitar teacher who quickly spots issues in your playing. This helps you fix what needs to get fixed so you improve fast and play with guitar speed like you never knew before.
Want to become a killer lead guitarist in no time? Get started taking online rock guitar lessons and study with a teacher who has already helped thousands of other rock guitarists achieve their musical goals.