3 Common Mistakes That Make Your Guitar Speed Technique Sound Sloppy

It’s a common misconception that getting better at guitar speed techniques simply means moving your hands faster and repeating things over and over until speed just “happens”.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case and actually does very little to help you increase your speed.

Good news is, correcting mistakes and misconceptions like this helps you do what it takes to truly improve your technique and play with tons of speed.

Let’s correct some of those mistakes now and get you on the right path!

Here we go:

 

Mistake #1: Moving Your Hand Faster To Pick Faster

Moving your hands faster seems to be a logical way to play faster… but it’s not.

This actually creates sloppy and unnecessary motion that throws you out of time. Result: sloppy playing.

So, what really generates speed?

Efficient movement.

The more efficiently you move your hands to pick or play notes, the more smooth and effortless speed becomes.

Sound good?

Thought so!

Here is an example of why moving your hand fast doesn’t increase speed, while moving more efficiently does:

As you observed, speed is generated by the efficiency of your movement.

Make everything you do on guitar as efficient as possible – get faster. It’s as simple as that.

This also applies to how much pressure you use to fret notes with your fretting hand.

Here is how to eliminate inefficient use of pressure to make it feel easier to play faster:

Mistake #2: Alternate Picking Everything

Many guitar players alternate pick everything they play and never try (or learn about) other methods for picking fast.

This causes them to waste tons of movement in their pick attack, which translates to sloppy technique and speed that just feels much more difficult than it should.

“So, what is a better way to pick?”

Glad you asked!

Here is an example of how to pick more efficiently to speed up your guitar playing while making it much easier to play fast at the same time:

Notice how picking with efficient movement and not breaking your picking momentum makes it feel much more smooth while playing?

This is because you are training yourself to lock your hands together in sync.

When your hands are locked in perfect sync, it becomes easy to play guitar fast.


Here’s an exercise to help you master this picking technique:

Isolate the picking hand movement by only playing a simple fretting pattern.

For example, play frets 7, 8 and 9 on every string while focusing closely on making your picking hand movement as efficient as possible as shown in the video.

Practice this just 10 minutes a day at first.

Eventually you get used to how it feels and it becomes easy to apply in every aspect of your guitar playing.

 

Mistake #3: Moving Your Picking Hand Off-Line While Sweep Picking

This is a common but very rarely noticed mistake. While sweep picking it’s easy to focus on the notes you are fretting and the act of lining up the actions of your picking hand with those of your fretting hand…

This makes it easy to not notice when your picking hand is moving in an inefficient path across the strings.

It should be moving in a straight line up and down the strings, with no deviation.

Look how straight picking hand stays in a line as it plays in this video:

Note: There are other mistakes that have not been discussed in this article.

However, overcoming the ones discussed here help you make massive improvements to your overall guitar playing and speed.

To learn more ways to play guitar faster, cleaner and with less effort – find a great guitar teacher and begin taking guitar lessons.

This gives you additional personal insight on your playing that you would not have had otherwise… from an expert at that.

Rock on, until next time!