How To Play Guitar Fast – Free 14 Day Mini Course – Part 6
Welcome back to part 6 of the mini course on how to build guitar speed!
So far we have discussed a large number of highly effective approaches about how to practice guitar in order to build guitar speed. As you continue to apply them to your guitar playing, your guitar speed will continue to improve.
In this lesson I will teach you about a critically important aspect for building guitar speed that most guitarists never practice. Although all of the guitar speed building techniques and strategies I have shown you so far are very important, it is the concepts that I will share with you today that will make the biggest difference in your mastery of playing guitar fast and your ability to actually USE guitar speed as a creative element in your guitar playing.
Two types of guitar speed:
When most guitar players approach building guitar speed, they practice guitar trying to become faster with one electric guitar technique at a time. Although there is nothing wrong with this method in and of itself, if your strategy for learning to play guitar fast stops there, you will have a difficult time using and applying speed in expressive ways when you play guitar.
The truth is that whenever you have to play guitar in a real life musical context (at any speed), you rarely do so with one technique at a time. Although you may sometimes play phrases consisting of only one guitar technique, more often than not, truly expressive guitar playing often requires you to seamlessly integrate multiple guitar playing and musical skills. Examples of this include combining more than one guitar technique or playing one guitar technique in an unusual way (such as in combination with fretting hand position shifts or string skipping or both), switching between playing rhythm guitar and lead guitar or a variety of other possibilities.
Most guitar players practice building guitar speed linearly (with one technique at a time) and as a result struggle to play fast in real musical contexts, particularly those where you are put on the spot (such as when improvising or performing). You will see greater results in your guitar playing when, in addition to practicing for guitar speed in the usual way (as described above), you start to practicing guitar to by integrating several technique simultaneously.
Today I will give you an introduction to the way I train my guitar students to learn and master this 'geometric' way of building guitar speed (which is actually part of a larger, strategic geometric approach that I use to train them to become great musicians).
As you begin to practice in this way, you will experience a very dramatic improvement not only in your guitar speed but also in your ability to play guitar consistently well with great accuracy.
In this lesson I will show you several examples of guitar phrases that require you to integrate more than one type of guitar technique together. As you practice the exercises below, I want you to apply the general guitar speed building strategies you have learned throughout the mini course as well as follow the specific tips given next to each example:
Example 1 - the exercise below uses a scale sequence that combines regular picking with hammer ons and pull offs. The specific lick below is one possible example of the kind of exercises you should practice on guitar when working on 'integrating guitar techniques'. It is an illustration of how different guitar techniques are often used in 'real life' guitar playing and improvising.
Example 2: The phrase below is another example of how several guitar techniques can be integrated together in one musical passage. In this case, the two guitar techniques used are sweep picking and directional picking. In addition, there is a fast position shift required for your fretting hand in order to transition from playing arpeggios to the scale sequence. Once again, the most important thing to learn here is not the lick itself but rather the general approach of practicing guitar by integrating many musical skills at once. The goal is to make the lick sound totally smooth, clean and seamless - just like it would have to sound in a real guitar solo.
Example 3: This example only uses one guitar technique (sweep picking), however, the challenge here is in transitioning from playing 6 notes per beat (sixteenth note triplets) to 4 notes per beat (regular sixteenth notes) as well as incorporating some 2 hand tapping. When most guitar players practice guitar and try to build their guitar speed, they usually concentrate on doing so with phrases that use a single type of note values at a time, in a linear way. However, when playing guitar solos in music, you will rarely use only one type of note values for a significant length of time. This is why one of the elements of guitar speed mastery is being able to seamlessly switch between different note values while playing at any speed.
As you practice the licks above, apply all of the guitar speed building strategies you have learned so far in this mini course. The process of practicing guitar to build speed when integrating guitar techniques remains essentially the same, except for shifting focus on tying several different skills together to avoid only being fast with one skill or technique.
Obviously you must practice more than 3 examples to truly master this skill, but the ideas in this lesson will get you on the right path to practicing correctly. If you are stuck with trying to find more such examples of how to integrate guitar techniques together you should find a guitar teacher who knows how to teach these skills effectively and can help you to practice them correctly.
These approaches to practicing will help you to avoid sounding like a guitar speed robot and play guitar like a creative musician who uses speed as an expressive tool.
I take my guitar students through this kind of training as I help them not only to reach the level of guitar speed that they want but also to USE that speed in creative ways. If you want me to help you develop and master these skills in your guitar playing faster, watch this video about online guitar lessons and tell me more about yourself in the evaluation form.
Go here to review Lesson 1 of this mini course.
Go here to review Lesson 2.
Review Lesson 3 here.
Review Lesson 4 here.
Review Lesson 5 here.