How To Use Simple Guitar Speed Licks To Get A Lot Faster
Wish your guitar speed was incredibly fast, accurate and impressive but don't know how to fix the mistakes you make that slow you down?
Don't worry, everyone struggles with this every once in a while...
...but you're about to learn what to do about it!
I've got 7 guitar speed licks that anyone can play which help you get faster speed in no time.
These guitar licks help you improve your picking technique while transitioning from one string to the next in order to play clean while using excellent fundamental technique.
Sound good?
Let's begin.
Watch this free video with 7 simple guitar licks exercises to play faster than ever:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
See my other guitar playing videos, available to my YouTube subscribers - follow my channel by clicking the button below:
Now you have simple guitar licks to practice that help you play faster in less time. However, there is much more to learn about playing guitar fast and clean.
Use these additional guitar speed tips to play solos, licks and exercises faster and cleaner:
Guitar Speed Tip #1: Use Efficient Picking Motion
It's very hard to play guitar with clean speed when you play with inefficient motion in your hands. This especially applies to your picking hand motion.
Minimizing movement in your picking hand is critical for making fast guitar playing feel effortless and smooth.
So, how do you do it?
Make your picking hand motion more efficient by:
- Using directional picking to always move the pick in the direction of the string you are moving to.
- Paying attention to how far you bring the pick away from the strings while playing notes (minimize this as much as possible).
- Watching your picking hand as you practice to identify any mistakes.
Focus closely on these things during the most difficult guitar licks when you make the most mistakes. This is when you are more likely to use inefficient motion or poor technique.
Guitar Speed Tip #2: Listen To Your Mistakes At Faster Speeds
For instance, when you are playing a guitar scale at fast speeds, you need to know what to fix in order to clean it up when you make mistakes. To do that, your ability to spot mistakes needs to be develop further.
Practice challenging guitar speed licks just a few notes at a time. Then play these few notes as fast as you can. This helps you see your mistakes more easily because there is less for your mind to process. Another approach that helps you during faster guitar licks is to go back and forth between playing fast and playing slow, then observing any differences in your technique in order to fix it.
When you only play fast for some minutes at a time, it is easier to fall into auto-pilot mode and start forming bad habits or making mistakes.
Combining all the approaches here helps you laser-focus on what you are doing with your hands from multiple angles in order to quickly refine your technique and play with faster, cleaner guitar speed.
You start to train your muscles to use the most efficient motions and begin to ingrain them into your fast playing.
Guitar Speed Tip #3: Use Double Picking
Double picking is a great way to line your hands up in perfect sync. Try double picking every note of a difficult guitar lick or scale at a tempo that is slower than the original. Then slowly increase the tempo to develop better two-hand synchronization.
This makes playing the original guitar lick feel much easier and serves as an excellent warm up.
Guitar Speed Tip #4: Isolate Tough Notes Within Scales
Do you ever feel like you can play a scale about 75% fast but end up struggling through a few notes that hold everything back (for example: during parts where you need to change positions or switch strings like mentioned in the video)?
This makes playing guitar fast feel like a struggle.
Keeping your hands in sync together helps make your scale runs feel much more smooth at fast speeds.
One way to improve synchronization between your hands is to practice the challenging parts of the scale separate from other parts that you have already mastered. Work on just a few notes at a time (like shown in the video) by playing them at your max speed, with a short period of silence in between each repetition. After you are able to play the notes well like this, integrate them back into the scale and practice it as a whole.
What Is The Next Step For Fast Guitar Playing?
Take lessons with a guitar teacher rather than trying to learn everything on your own.
It's hard when your guitar playing progress starts to slow down and you don't know what to work on to get better. This is a big reason why you need to work with an experienced guitar teacher who has already helped many others solve the same problems you have.
A great guitar teacher is going to help you understand where you are going wrong, so you don't waste tons of time, become frustrated or stop practicing. Not only does this make playing guitar more enjoyable, but it makes you more motivated to get better and better every day.
Not to mention - you just get better, faster and cleaner in much less time.
Here is what my guitar students say about taking lessons and how it helped them improve:
“I found Tom Hess on the net through articles, and I read quite a few of those before I went to Tom’s website. Even though I’m not a metal player at all, and Tom is obviously a metal player, I could still see that his ideas and way of teaching could really benefit me. So I pretty much signed up for online guitar lessons with Tom straight away once I’d gone through the website, and it’s just been a real eye opener with the way he teaches…”
... the integration of concepts that he’ll give you and having a really structured strategy… not just week to week lessons, but things that - you can see from one lesson to the next - really develop and continue to work on your technique and your theory and aural skills and those types of things. So I’d played a long time… 20 years before I really caught onto Tom, and I’d had a lot of lessons, and I’d taught and played but I can really see improvements in my technique, sweeping, and picking which weren’t strong parts of my playing.
I feel like Tom has a good gauge of where you’re at as a guitar player and what you need, and there just seemed to be so much more stuff in the lessons week to week than what you’d ever get in an hour or so in a one on one lesson… way more. So yeah I think that and the forum. I think, I’d pay the money just for the forum. That alone would be fine… I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. So that alone is massive!
The price for the lessons, that’s nothing... nothing. You know, I think it’s, pretty cheap to be honest. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cheap. Cheap is not a good word, but I just think it’s great value… awesome value. I mean, you know, you could pay that for one-to-one lessons and you just don’t get the same results and support of the forum and the content and the strategies.
Other teachers I’ve had have been good players, and some have become good friends too. But when I’ve started lessons with Tom I’ve got something to compare that to and a lot of it is just sort of teaching songs from week to week… a lot of the lesson will be left up to you… you’ll go to your lesson and they’ll be like what do you want to do today? At the time I said, oh do this song or that song, but with Tom you start to realize that you know, there’s more to it… the goals and you know he’s sort of more in contact with what you want to be able to do as a player, because he’s asking you the questions and then setting up the strategies, so I find that really good.
Yeah I can see more results in 18 months in a lot of areas in my playing than you know 20 years. So it’s sort of, you know, would’ve been great 20 years ago to have met Tom.
Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia
When I started learning from Tom, the main thing that made him different from other teachers was that he was showing me how to excel in all aspects of my guitar playing by applying the skills that I already knew together with the new material that I was learning from him.
He made me aware of both strengths and weaknesses in my playing that I did not even know I had. From there he gave me the knowledge, tools and guidance to literally transform my guitar playing by enabling me to overcome things that were preventing me from becoming a truly creative and self-expressive guitar player. These were the kinds of things that none of my previous guitar teachers and books I studied were able to do for me.
After Tom made me aware of all the things I was missing in my guitar playing and provided me with the strategy and tools for solving them, I began to make very fast progress in all areas of my guitar playing.
I can now write my own music and can create lead guitar solos that I am happy and fulfilled with. I also have the technical skills to confidently and easily play anything that I want to express. I have overcome all of the lead guitar challenges that I struggled with before, and increased my guitar speed to virtuoso levels. More importantly, I have the knowledge and understanding of how to continually improve my guitar playing and musical skills to higher and higher levels to continue expressing myself with my music. Overall, I have definitely transformed in a huge way as a musician and as a person through my lessons with Tom Hess. I am grateful to him for guiding me towards becoming the guitarist I always wanted to be!"
Mike Philippov, Indiana, USA
“When I first heard about Tom Hess, I saw that he was a teacher that was very dedicated and serious about it, and that drew me in immediately. That this is a guy that has a plan, has a goal and really if you’re serious about learning guitar, this guy is equally as serious in a way. So it resonated with me straight away.”
I started out just learning by myself and as many others I got stuck. I had a few issues I wanted to get by, but when I met Tom and talked with him and started lessons with him, he opened up a whole new world of possibilities of what guitar playing can be.
I feel very grateful that I found lessons from Tom since I then did what worked from the very beginning. Many guitarists I see that played way longer than I did, they have build up many bad habits. That from the very start, there was clear instruction of how to practice correctly. You build the ability for high speed and whatever you want from the very beginning and you don’t waste time doing inefficient things. So I’m very grateful that I did that, and now I really feel I am able to reach whatever level I want.
The reasons why I think I feel so motivated all the time is because I know that the thing I’m working on is relevant for me and it’s exactly the direct thing I need to get.
The forum just kicks ass. The people in the forum - it’s just like unconditional help all the time. They love to help out, and you also get very inspired by seeing someone just really getting speed really quick and then you say if he can do it, I can do it. It works on the mental side of being a guitarist and that of course that’s the most important thing. Just being around other musicians like that, is just you learn so much faster, is so much less frustration when you can see that all the people are having the same issues that you do, not anything special or anything. It’s just part of learning process, so it kicks ass.
Magnus Gautestad, Norway