No matter where you go online, guitar players are giving out advice for how to get faster lead guitar speed and play guitar solos like a shredder…

Bad news is:

A lot of info out there is actually destructive for your guitar playing and may slow down your progress rather than helping you get better.

A lot of guitar speed advice focuses on ideas that sound logical, but don’t work in practice.

For example:

“Alternate picking should always be used to play as fast as possible.”

(More on why this isn’t the case below)

Today you are going to learn several ways to navigate around common ineffective speed guitar tips in order to truly play as fast as you want to.

Sound good?

Cool.

Get started playing with killer lead guitar speed by studying the points that follow and implementing what you learn into your playing now:

 

False Belief #1: Playing With Speed Sacrifices Expressive Creativity

This false belief is based on the common mistake that fast guitarists make: practicing technique all the time without learning how to integrate their skills into music.

When speed is used constantly during a solo it can eventually feel robotic and lifeless.

How do you fix this?

Simple.

Practice guitar scales, arpeggios and techniques both in isolation (to master the technical aspects) and in musical situations to work on how you use speed to express yourself.

This helps you begin to develop better guitar phrasing for higher quality solos and licks.

Here’s one way to practice this:

1.   Choose any guitar scale or arpeggio you are familiar with

2.   Start from just the first few notes of the scale/arpeggio, improvise freely to create a short phrase

3.   Create 15 variations of this phrase using different note rhythms, picking techniques, legato, vibrato or any other technique you can think of

4.   Next, add one more note and repeat the process (add no more than 5 notes at a time)

Practicing this simple exercise only takes 5-10 minutes and is an excellent way to jump start your phrasing and help you begin playing musically expressive solos and licks.

 

Quick Guitar Cleanliness Practice Tip:

Do not use effects such as delay or reverb as you practice.

These effects mask poor articulation and sloppy synchronization and make it very difficult to hear when your notes are truly clean and which ones are not clean.

So practice with regular distortion only and this will make it much easier to spot mistakes and fix them.

(Of course, when you are just playing for fun or recording, you can use any effects you want.)

Also, isolate difficult parts of exercises that slow you down and practice them in isolation to bring up your speed.

When you play through a lick, exercise, etc., some parts of it are usually faster than others for a while. Your goal should be to bring up the slowest parts to the level of the faster ones so you can play the entire passage at a consistent tempo with a metronome.

Playing the entire passage does not help you do this as effectively until you focus on the specific parts that are the hardest for you.

 

False Belief #2: Developing Faster Guitar Speed Requires Years Of Practice For Hours A Day

Ever hear the stories of how X famous guitar player practiced 5 hours a day for years until they became an amazing guitarist?

That’s cool, but not everyone has the time to do this…

Plus, practicing guitar this way isn’t necessarily productive or effective.

Why?

Getting better and faster with guitar is about being effective and efficient with your time. It’s about quality over quantity.

The good news about this is, you can practice as little as 30 minutes per day and get amazing results very quickly.

This video explains a powerful practice approach that helps you get more results in less time: