How To Get Fast Guitar Speed By Practicing With Speed Bursts
Want to play with fast guitar speed but don't know how to get to the next level without making a lot of mistakes?
You aren't limited to only practicing at slow speeds while gradually increasing the tempo over the course of days, months or years.
Instead, try practicing at fast speeds.
How exactly?
Answer:
Practice using bursts of speed.
Many guitarists don't know about this powerful guitar speed practice approach, but you're about to learn it and become faster than ever...
Get started playing with faster guitar speed by watching the demonstration in this video:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Here are a few more pieces of advice on how to play guitar fast and clean like never before:
Fast Guitar Speed Tip #1: Use Efficient Picking Technique For Easier Speed
Having inefficient picking technique keeps you from effortlessly playing guitar fast and clean.
I recommend to use directional picking.
This means:
- Use alternate picking while playing on a single string.
- When you change strings, move the pick using a pickstroke in the direction of the string change. In other words: when you move to a thinner string, use a downstroke. Moving to a thicker string = upstroke.
This applies no matter what pick stroke you used before.
When you descend to a lower (thicker) string, use an upstroke (no matter what pick stroke you used before).
This makes your picking more efficient and helps you build more speed in less time.
Fast Guitar Speed Tip #2: Use Thumb Muting Over Palm Muting To Clean Up Notes
This helps you keep your playing cleaner because you don't use motion that brings your hand away from the strings (by picking).
How do you perform thumb muting?
Simple.
Just rest your picking hand’s thumb on the thicker strings below the one you are playing on to keep them from ringing out.
Guitar Speed Tip #3: Practice Occassionally Without Distortion
Playing guitar without distortion forces you to pick the notes with more power and develops your ability to articulate notes.
It also helps you keep your hands in sync while playing - making playing guitar fast feel effortless.
Now you have enough information to play guitar fast and clean today.
What's next?
Answer:
Develop and improve the rest of your guitar playing.
This includes not only your speed and technical skills, but also things like your understanding of theory, songwriting, phrasing, improvising, skill integration, etc.
I will help you become not just a guitarist, but an incredible overall musician with Breakthrough Guitar Lessons.
Your guitar lessons with me are not cookie-cutter lessons like those of many teachers. You and I work together until your ultimate guitar playing goals are reached.
When we begin, you complete an extensive assessment – this gives me all the information I need to understand your musical knowledge, guitar playing skills, and short/long-term musical goals.
From there I:
Study your evaluation from and build a lesson plan for achieving your musical goals, based on everything you've told me.
Create a lesson strategy for you for the next 3-6 months and compile your lesson materials.
Your lesson materials are made of all your exercises, training, licks and etudes that improve your skills and help you achieve your goals.
All you have to do is practice the things I tell you to practice.
How much time do you need to spend on guitar practice?
Most of my guitar students practice for a half hour to hour per day.
The more you practice, the better you get. But even if you practice just 20 minutes per day, you still have the potential to get massive results.
In between the lessons, I help you better understand the things you've learned.
You can get help and support from me in a variety of ways, such as:
- Coming to weekly office hours (where you can ask me questions live). I'll be live every week on Zoom to help you by answering your questions.
- Taking part in monthly like classes. In these classes, I take the hardest guitar playing topics and break them down to make them easy to understand and master. Plus, it’s another opportunity for you to ask me questions.
- Giving me feedback about each lesson. This way I know exactly where you are at and how to help you get better.
- Sending me recordings of your playing for feedback. This shows me what you need help with the most.
- Asking me questions when you aren't sure what to do. (You can email me 24/7.)
- Updating your guitar practice journal on my private student forum, so I can see exactly how you are practicing.
- Asking for more help on the forum from my other top students on the forum.
The more items from this list you do, the more quickly you improve.
The fewer of these things you do, the more slowly you improve.
From all of these things, I can track your progress and adjust your lesson strategy when necessary.
Note that how long you practice is only one piece of the puzzle.
Plus:
Your musical goals will likely change or become refined over time (this is normal). If and when this happens, I make changes to your lesson plan as needed.
That’s why it’s impossible for me to predict an “end” point before we begin.
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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