How To Play Guitar Fast – Free 14 Day Mini Course – Part 3
Welcome back to lesson 3 of the mini course about guitar speed building techniques.
In the previous lesson, we focused on two commonly neglected elements of guitar speed practice: articulation and synchronization. If you did the guitar speed practicing assignments from the last part of this mini course and practiced applying the ideas discussed to the scale sequence you learned in lesson 1 you should start to find your maximum guitar speed feeling easier and becoming more reliable.
In this lesson I want to address a very common question I receive from guitar players about guitar speed building techniques: 'What is the best practicing strategy to use for practicing guitar speed exercises?'
The truth is that there are multiple effective guitar speed practice methods and depending on your current skill level some are more appropriate for you than others.
When I train my guitar students in my online guitar lessons, I already know everything about their current skill level, their musical challenges and guitar playing goals. As a result, I am able to design for them the most relevant and highly specific guitar speed practice strategies. In this mini course I will share with you one example of an intermediate level guitar speed practicing strategy and one example of a more advanced practice approach. You can begin applying either of those right away depending on your current skill level. Both of these strategies (discussed below) will work extremely well with the scale sequence I showed you in lesson 1 as well as with all guitar speed exercises you practice.
The intermediate guitar speed practicing strategy (use this strategy if your maximum guitar speed is less than 140 bpm in 16th notes):
One of the most common guitar speed practice methods that the majority of guitarists use to build their speed is the following:
1. Start practicing at a slow speed
2. Increase speed incrementally until getting stuck at a certain tempo (your maximum guitar speed).
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 using a variety of guitar speed exercises hoping to eventually break through their maximum speed.
A much more effective variation of this approach is to do the following:
1. Establish your top guitar speed first (as you already did in lesson 1).
2. Observe what things are going wrong in your guitar playing at this maximum speed. Where and why do the mistakes happen? What can you refine more in your guitar technique or in your approach to guitar speed practicing?
3. Slow down your guitar playing speed to 40-50% of your maximum and as you play, look for traces of the mistakes you identified at your top speed starting to appear. These mistakes will be a lot easier to control and fix at slower tempos after you become aware of them. As you do this over and over, you will find that your guitar speed will begin to increase.
The advanced guitar speed practicing strategy (use this strategy if your maximum speed is at least 140 bpm in 16th notes):
When it comes to building your guitar speed with longer scale sequences and similar guitar speed exercises, one of the ways to achieve that goal is to take smaller sections of the longer sequence and practice them in repetitive patterns at or near your maximum speed. The reason for doing this is that you will always be able to play guitar faster with a smaller section of the sequence than you can with a full sequence. As a result of this guitar speed building technique, you will be getting mentally and physically used to playing at tempos that are faster than your normal maximum guitar speed for playing the full sequence.
An example of such a repetitive pattern used as a guitar speed exercise can look like this (this is a fragment from the scale sequence shown in the 1st lesson of this mini course):
Cycle this short fragment by playing it over and over without stopping. The goal here is to allow yourself to play guitar at a tempo that is faster than your normal practicing speed by reducing the number of notes you are playing and limiting fretting hand motions to one place on the guitar neck. You can increase the challenge by gradually playing more notes at the faster speed until eventually you are playing the full sequence at that same tempo).
As your assignment between now and the next lesson, I want you to continue working on building speed with the scale sequence you learned in lesson 1 using one of the guitar speed building techniques described in this part of the mini course (use the one that is appropriate for your current skill level).
Obviously, I do not expect you to master applying these guitar speed practice approaches in 2 days, so do not put yourself under a lot of pressure to do so in such a short period of time. In the next several parts of this guitar speed mini course we will take a break from working on specific guitar speed practice strategies and I will explain to you several critical guitar practicing concepts to help you get the most from working on guitar speed exercises. This will give you more time to apply the ideas you have learned so far.
As you are organizing your guitar practicing, remember to give adequate time to all other critically important musical skills that will enable you to use your guitar speed in creative and expressive ways. Do not make the mistake of trying to 'wait' until you master guitar technique to begin focusing on your other skills. Remember that the day WILL come when you have developed the guitar speed you want, but if your other musical skills are far behind, you will be frustrated because you will still not feel like a musician.
This is why, when I teach guitar players online, I focus on a variety of musical skills in each lesson to help them learn how to go beyond simply 'playing guitar' and on to 'playing music'. If you want to become the best guitar player you can be, read this page about guitar lessons online.
I will see you in the next lesson!
Go here to review Lesson 1 of this mini course.
Go here to review Lesson 2.