Learn How To Fix Flailing Fingers On Guitar

Now you know how to fix flailing fingers on guitar. With this knowledge, it is time to learn more ways to play guitar fast and clean. Get started using these effective guitar playing tips:

Tip #1: Improve Your Rhythmic Timing To Make Fast Guitar Playing Sound Better

It is very common that guitarists play slightly off beat during fast guitar playing.

This produces guitar playing that simply sounds a little off...

...not good.

Training yourself to become more tight rhythmically solves this issue.

Timing is a very critical skill you will need to have in order to play music in a tight manner (especially with bands or in the studio).

How do you make your fast guitar playing tighter rhythmically?

Answer:

Get started by simply finding a comfortable tempo to play any guitar idea while using a metronome.

(If possible, use recording software so you can visibly see what is going on.)

Play a short section of any guitar lick, solo or exercise you want to play over this tempo.

Observe any mistakes in your timing.

As you learn to hear where the timing issues happen, it becomes much easier to consciously correct your timing to keep your guitar playing tight.

Note: Do this while using minimal guitar effects beyond distortion (or even use clean guitar playing).

Using a lot of effects is fun, but it masks the notes - making it harder to hear exactly how on beat your notes are. Aim for making the beat of the metronome disappear underneath the notes you play in order to be in perfect timing.

Tip #2: Push Your Limits Every Once In A While

We often get into specific guitar playing habits due to playing the same things over and over. This can be fun and enjoyable but can also hold you back from making progress.

While playing fast guitar licks, pushing your limits helps you gain clean speed faster.

How can this be done?

There are many ways but here are some ideas for you to use right away:

If you are playing an exercise at a certain tempo, break it down into segments of a few notes at a time and play them at a much faster tempo. This takes you out of your comfort zone while programming you to think at faster speeds.

Double pick the notes of a given exercise to lock your hands together in sync. This must be performed at a slower tempo than that of the original exercise, but makes playing the original exercise much easier as well.

Pick the strings of the guitar using much more power than usual. This articulates the notes better and forces you to improve your two-hand synchronization - improving the speed and cleanliness of whatever you are playing.

Tip #3: Always Look For Subtle Mistakes In Your Guitar Playing

Many guitarists hate making mistakes and avoid them by playing easier licks or by taking shortcuts that enable them to almost play a certain lick the right (but not quite).

Instead of doing this, embrace mistakes because they show you what you need to do to get better.

Especially pay attention to listening your mistakes while playing guitar at faster speeds.

For example, when you are playing a single string guitar scale as fast as you can and see that your hands aren't in sync, you must know things such as where everything is breaking down within the scale and what the underlying causes are of the issue.

To do that, you need to improve your ability to focus while practicing.

One way to do this:

Work on breaking up challenging guitar licks into much smaller sections of a few notes at a time. This makes it much easier to process what is going on without becoming overwhelmed.

Another approachthat will help you during faster licks is to move between fast guitar playing and slower guitar playing for many repetitions. When you only play fast for several minutes at a time, you eventually get tired and your guitar playing becomes sloppy.

Moving back and forth between slow and fast playing in short bursts of focus gives you the chance to change your muscle memory by going over the right slow technical motions before playing fast.

This tells your brain to start giving the correct signals to your fingers leading to cleaner guitar playing over time.

That said, it is understandable that you may not always know what to focus on or how to go about practicing in order to correct bad habits like flailing guitar fingers (from the video) or mistakes that make fast guitar playing sloppy.