How To Get 2-Hand Synchronization On Guitar To Make Your Speed Feel Effortless
Want to play with fast guitar speed but keep making sloppy mistakes or can't play very consistently?
Solution:
Focus on improving your 2-hand synchronization on guitar to keep your hands together so you only fret a note at the exact moment you are picking the string to play it.
Keeping both of your hands together in sync is critical for making your guitar speed feel effortless while making it consistently clean.
How exactly do you practice to get better at 2-hand synchronization on guitar?
I'll show you.
Get started playing with fast and effortless guitar speed by watching this video about 2-hand synchronization on guitar:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Now you have a powerful exercise to help you improve your 2-hand synchronization on guitar quickly. Learn more ways to play guitar fast with ease by reading these additional tips:
Tip #1: Make Your Picking Motion Efficient
Playing guitar with fast speed requires moving your hands with efficient movement.
This is especially important with your picking technique.
Having technique that uses efficient movement is critical for helping you pick the string more in less time.
To do this, I use directional picking.
Here is how it works:
- Use alternate picking whenever you are playing on a single string.
- Whenever you move from one string to another, use a pickstroke that lines up in the direction of the string change. In other words - move to a thinner string means using a downstroke. Moving to a thicker string means using an upstroke.
This makes your picking technique efficient, plus it improves your ability to pick with better articulation and 2-hand synchronization.
Tip #2: Use Thumb Muting To Mute Strings
Muting with your thumb helps you play clean more easily because it doesn't require using a motion that brings your hand away from the strings (as with conventional palm muting).
How do you perform thumb muting?
Simple.
Just rest your picking hand’s thumb on the strings below (in pitch) the one you are playing on to prevent them from blending together.
Tip #3: Practice Guitar On Clean Settings
Playing guitar without distortion/on clean settings challenges you to articulate notes with more power and develops your ability to keep your hands in sync while playing - making playing guitar fast feel effortless.
Practice on clean settings sometimes to identify your 2-hand synchronization between hands and make adjustments to improve it.
For example:
Pick every note of a guitar lick twice instead of once in order to allow your picking hand to catch up to your fretting hand.
Now you have some tools to help you play guitar fast and clean in no time.
What's next?
Answer:
Learn the fastest ways to improve weak areas of your guitar playing and reach your musical goals.
This includes not only developing faster speed and great technical skills, but also things like mastering theory, getting better at songwriting, learning how to play melodic phrases, improvising like a pro, etc.
I will help you become not just a good guitarist, but an amazing musician with my Breakthrough Guitar Lessons.
Your guitar lessons with me are not one-size-fits-all lessons like those of tons of everyday teachers. You and I work together until your greatest musical goals are achieved.
When we get started, you complete a detailed assessment – this gives me all the information I need to know your musical knowledge, level of guitar playing skills, and overall musical goals.
After studying your evaluation from and creating a lesson plan for your goals, I create a lesson strategy for you for the next 3-6 months and put together your lesson materials.
Your materials are made of all your exercises, training, licks and etudes that improve your skills and help you achieve your goals.
The more you practice, the greater the results you get.
But even if you practice just 15 minutes every day, you still have the potential to get amazingly better.
Plus:
Your musical goals will likely switch or become refined over time (this is not at all uncommon).
If and when this happens, I make changes to your lesson plan to put you on the right course.
Here are the results you can expect as a student of mine:
“Before I started taking correspondence lessons I was basically stagnant in my playing. I had kind of reached what I thought was a pinnacle and I started looking for what’s next, what’s bigger and better… and I just happened across Tom’s lessons and since then I’ve realized that this plateau that I was feeling was way down here and now he’s helped me tremendously. I know I can do things on the guitar that I could’ve never dreamed of five years ago.”
I chose to take guitar lessons with Tom over anybody else because a) Tom is a professional musician, and I want to learn from people who are making a living as a musician and b) he just had a wealth of knowledge that he freely gives to you to kind of say here, you know here is the golden nugget.
The biggest change in my playing that has happened since I started taking lessons with Tom is playing like a true musician, phrasing like a true musician, and kind of separating myself away from all the wannabes.
So if I were to compare Tom’s correspondence lessons with just taking private lesson in a local market, it’s night and day. For one thing, Tom’s lessons are easy to understand, they’re very in depth and they’re tailored to what you want to learn… versus private lessons, a lot of times the teachers are using their students as guinea pigs to figure out how to teach… and Tom’s not doing that, he’s knows what he’s doing.
Thoughts when I started with Tom were “Is this going to work for me?” because it was definitely not the norm. And my thoughts now are “Hell yes it’s going to work”, because you see results.
Tom’s goal-oriented approach has helped me, I guess break horizons and get results that I could’ve never gotten before. Only because he helped me flesh out how I want to play and how to get there. He gave the goals and the path to get there, and it’s been excellent. Tom is like he says, an ordinary guy, but he’s doing extraordinary things, and I know in my life that’s what I want to do. I just want to be an ordinary guy that is impacting lives, and that’s been huge from Tom.
Ty Morgan, Phoenix, Arizona
“I started playing guitar maybe about 15 years ago. I had a really crappy teacher. Basically, based on some bad advice I went to learn classical guitar. I mean I wanted to learn electric guitar, but my friends learned classical, then acoustic, then electric. So I foolishly went to the music school and said I want to learn classical guitar, but they never asked me why, what do I want to do, so they said yeah ok, here’s a guitar, let’s go.”
So after about a year of faking trying to learn music notation, I quit. But I really loved, music, the guitar, so, I’m a pretty creative person in general, so I just you know, came up with a whole bunch of stuff on the guitar. I was self-taught for many years, until I came across Tom’s website. And then what happened was… after reading all of his articles, I used his article on how to choose a guitar teacher, and I went around my local city in Kuala Lumpur, trying to find teachers based on that criteria and of course they couldn’t even meet one criterion. And I actually went for a few lessons, and after a while it was like, well, it’s not worth it, I’m just going to go with Tom.
He has a lot of freaking awesome students. I’ve been playing guitar for 15 years, I’ve been a correspondence student for about 5 years or 6 years, everything prior to that was just a waste of time.
The forum is beyond words. I mean, I ask a question and I get 20 responses or 10 responses from very helpful people. Everybody is trying to help there. Nobody is criticizing like anybody. Everybody is just so helpful. It’s like having 20 Tom Hesses. It’s like, you know… 20 mentors, 20 people… more than that actually. So I think the forum is awesome for that. Not only because of the information available there, but just because of the people willing to help.
Vishaal Kapoor, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
“I started lessons when I was a young kid. I was in school. I had a casual teacher, but he only taught us chords, like basic stuff if you want to learn like 3 chord songs. But I wanted more than that, so I went to a local guitar teacher. But he also gave me the same thing. But after like 5 or 6 years of lessons, like I found myself, like if I heard a backing track or something, I couldn’t play with someone. I mean I didn’t feel like a musician, I feel like someone who can just move his fingers from like fret 1 to fret whatever. But with Tom, he’s giving me the tools to become what I want to become, become the musician I want to become. And this is exactly what I want.”
Tom Hess was basically the only guy on the internet with the credentials and the reviews, and basically everyone recommended him. He even had his own students webpage. All his students were like established guitar teachers and professional musicians and they had their own sites and I contacted like 7 of them, and they all recommended Tom Hess, and that’s why I joined him.
I like taking lessons with Tom because he gives me what I want. It’s not like something general for everyone. Like if you want to learn blues, he gives you lessons for blues, but I want to become a metal player and also a neoclassical player, so he’s giving me exactly what I need and what I want. And if I have a problem I just post a thread on the amazing forum, and I get like answers, not just short answers, but really detailed answers. I feel like I am taken care of, I don’t have to worry about anything. If I just follow everything word for word what Tom gives me in all of the lessons, that’s if I have time, because they’re so big, I mean every lesson, people think it’s overpriced, but each lesson, if you want to master it, take everything out of it, is going to take you like 4 weeks of 2 hours of work every day.
Mohamed Karim Koleilat, Beirut, Lebanon
“I was watching YouTube videos and I was going nowhere. The direction Tom was sending me in my first lessons was towards my goals, so I could see that I was progressing. ”
Basically, after half a year of stumbling on YouTube videos or other guitar websites, I found that my guitar playing was not going into any direction and that changed massively because he actually got me to learn my scales and arpeggios... learn what I need to learn to get to the level I want to be. In a sense, I joined shortly after I started guitar playing, then improved massively in every way possible: rhythm, lead, improvisation. Before I tried Tom, I was noodling around the first pentatonic shape.
Patrick Kogler, Austria
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