How To Play Guitar Faster And More Clean By Practicing Two-Hand Synchronization
It is much easier to play guitar fast when you improve your two-hand synchronization. Many guitarists neglect this crucial technique while building speed. This causes you to have tons of unusable speed (due to all the mistakes you make), and little usable speed for playing actual music.
Watch the video below to learn how to make fast guitar playing easy using effective two-hand synchronization training:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
Now you understand how to play guitar faster and cleaner by keeping both hands in sync.
Excellent synchronization between hands becomes effortless when you use a powerful picking attack (extra force) to articulate notes.
Record yourself to assess your two-hand synchronization with a short guitar lick and listen to recording.
If you haven't spent much time improving this skill, you will hear in many places that your hands were not hitting the string at exactly the same moment.
Don't worry, this is totally fine (you will be fixing this).
You need to work on moving both hands fast and explosively for each note so that they both arrive to the string at the same time (even if that note is going to sustain for a long time).
How to make your picking hand articulation stronger:
Chances are, your picking hand articulation can (and should be) much stronger.
Practice with the guitar unplugged for part of your practice time and you need to imagine that you are playing for an audience 50 feet away from you on your unplugged guitar and your goal is to get them to hear every note you play.
This visualization will force you to pick with more power and develop the articulation you need to make your playing sound better. Improving articulation will also help you with keeping both hands in sync.
Additionally, when you practice, look at your picking hand in addition to the fretting hand!
This simple adjustment is incredibly helpful for your picking technique development.
For example: Imagine you are practicing a sweep picking arpeggio.
Your picking hand movement needs to be more continuous and hit all the strings with one big downstroke instead of several distinct pick strokes (that is the key to sweep picking speed).
Watch your picking hand and visualize that you are moving your hand like one big strum. Watching your picking hand throughout this process helps you focus on keeping your motion efficient and smooth, leading to better notes and sync between hands.
Bonus Tip To Improve Your Guitar Playing Two-Hand Sync With Scales:
Pay attention to the timing of your playing when practicing scales to a metronome.
Watch out for the common mistake of starting off with good timing but then gradually speed up ahead of the click. Remember that lead guitar playing needs to be in time just like rhythm guitar playing.
To get better at this, concentrate on the notes that mark the beginning of each beat.
Accent them much harder with the pick and pay attention to making them line up with the click/drums.
This will give you an indication of whether or not you are playing in time (and if you can get the first note of each beat to be in sync with the click, the other notes will likely be in time as well).
Solve A Common Two-Hand Sync Problem For Guitarists:
Pay attention to the transition between each fretting hand shape of a scale or pattern and how it moves from position to position.
When your hand makes the jump to a shape requiring a position change, it is easy to become out of sync with your picking hand during the moment of transition (and then your synchronization recovers again during the course of playing).
To solve this, focus on the target note of the position shift to isolate it from the other aspects of the pattern and pick it with heavy picking power. This will make it easier to not lose synchronization during the transition.
General Guitar Practice Tip:
To improve your ability to play articulate and clear notes (with great sync), spend about 15 minutes per day playing the guitar unplugged and play your scale sequences and arpeggio exercises focusing on making the notes as loud as you possibly can with your picking hand.
This is going to improve your articulation greatly by forcing you to play loud.
Watch out if you are making very small motions with your pick (which is good in general) but there is very little power in those notes. The better your articulation becomes on an unplugged guitar, the easier it will be to play with an amp (and your top speed will feel easier as a result).
What Is The Best Way To Improve Your Guitar Technique? Answer: Find A Guitar Teacher
One of the biggest misconceptions that many guitar players have is that finding a guitar teacher is not worth the effort.
These guitarists often think that they can learn more on their own than with an experienced guitar teacher.
Although you can learn many things about guitar on your own, it would be greatly limiting to your progress as a guitarist to ignore all the benefits that come with working together with a guitar teacher.
By finding a guitar teacher, you save yourself countless hours of frustration and effort trying to break through playing barriers and correct mistakes.
This especially applies to guitar players who have not yet developed excellent sync between their hands.
Why?
This is one of the biggest frustrations that prevents guitarists from being able to play fast and clean. Ever sat down to practice and felt super frustrated because you kept playing something over and over, making the same mistakes?
Exactly.
This is what a guitar teacher is for.
However, simply finding any guitar teacher will not guarantee results.
It is essential that you understand how to find a guitar teacher who can truly help you reach your highest musical goals.
These types of teachers are very experienced and have given proven results to their students, like the ones these students got:
“When I met Tom Hess, I knew that this is the guy. Just going through the evaluation form, all the questions, different questions, and he was digging deeper and deeper into all my goals and all that stuff... and no one has ever done that with me before, so I felt right away that this is the guy.”
The level that I was at before I went to Tom for lessons was that I could play pretty fast, I could play sloppy, I didn’t know nothing about music theory, so I was kind of unbalanced, I was uneven. I was a good player technically, but I knew very little about music theory. So I wanted to even that out, and Tom has helped me, not only evening that out, but also exceeding my expectations. So now I’m playing at a level that I didn’t expect that I could play at. So that’s... I’m very happy with that.
I like lessons with Tom because of the format basically. He gives a variety of formats... not just one format, like video for example, but also pdf files and audio files that you can take with you if you’re doing something else... you have to do labor that day, laundry or whatever... then you can listen to the sessions and while... you can actually benefit when you’re not even practicing, so it’s a no brainer.Gottfrid Norberg Waxin, Sweden
“I found Tom Hess on the net through articles, and I read quite a few of those before I went to Tom’s website. Even though I’m not a metal player at all, and Tom is obviously a metal player, I could still see that his ideas and way of teaching could really benefit me. So I pretty much signed up for online guitar lessons with Tom straight away once I’d gone through the website, and it’s just been a real eye opener with the way he teaches…”
... the integration of concepts that he’ll give you and having a really structured strategy… not just week to week lessons, but things that - you can see from one lesson to the next - really develop and continue to work on your technique and your theory and aural skills and those types of things. So I’d played a long time… 20 years before I really caught onto Tom, and I’d had a lot of lessons, and I’d taught and played but I can really see improvements in my technique, sweeping, and picking which weren’t strong parts of my playing.
I feel like Tom has a good gauge of where you’re at as a guitar player and what you need, and there just seemed to be so much more stuff in the lessons week to week than what you’d ever get in an hour or so in a one on one lesson… way more. So yeah I think that and the forum. I think, I’d pay the money just for the forum. That alone would be fine… I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. So that alone is massive!
The price for the lessons, that’s nothing... nothing. You know, I think it’s, pretty cheap to be honest. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cheap. Cheap is not a good word, but I just think it’s great value… awesome value. I mean, you know, you could pay that for one-to-one lessons and you just don’t get the same results and support of the forum and the content and the strategies.
Other teachers I’ve had have been good players, and some have become good friends too. But when I’ve started lessons with Tom I’ve got something to compare that to and a lot of it is just sort of teaching songs from week to week… a lot of the lesson will be left up to you… you’ll go to your lesson and they’ll be like what do you want to do today? At the time I said, oh do this song or that song, but with Tom you start to realize that you know, there’s more to it… the goals and you know he’s sort of more in contact with what you want to be able to do as a player, because he’s asking you the questions and then setting up the strategies, so I find that really good.
Yeah I can see more results in 18 months in a lot of areas in my playing than you know 20 years. So it’s sort of, you know, would’ve been great 20 years ago to have met Tom.
Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia
“I've played guitar for several years and I think I've taken it as far as I could take it and I was going on the internet and found Tom, I take Breakthrough Guitar Lessons from him and I have to say it was the best thing that I've ever could have done. There is nothing better than Breakthrough Guitar Lessons with Tom.”
Tom has the innate ability to hone in on whatever problems you have and immediately fix it for you. The lessons are very goal oriented, very detailed and Tom is very approachable. I consider Tom to be a master teacher. A master teacher is someone who cares about their students, who talks to their students, who shares with their students and gets them to the place that they need to be as a guitar player. And Tom, I will tell you, does all of that and more.
Rovan Deon, Rahway, NJ, USA
“I had problems with physical playing. I couldn’t hold the pick, I was struggling a lot, there was frustration for like years. I started out looking for a YouTube solution, maybe someone knows how to angle the pick or build up speed and accidentally ran into Tom.”
The video wasn’t about playing, he only had a conversation. I listened up to him. I saw that Tom made a lot of sense in his speech, and I got interested. I went to his site, started looking at what he offered, got very interested, filled out the form, got my first lesson, started building up myself and started getting more results than I was getting before when I was self taught. It was an amazing experience that opened up so many doors, and still there are so many doors to open.
The material is specifically done for your individual needs, to reach your goals. You can always put up new goals. You can have feedback on your playing, see your weak areas and strong areas. Tom cares a lot about his students. He always reviews and watches how I am progressing so we can review material, step by step. Not skipping the steps. He is paying attention to it, and that’s what I like about it. I last felt this kind of motivation when I was 13 and starting out with a band, now I’m feeling the same fire and passion. There are students who are more advanced, more knowledgeable and have more experience. Instead of feeling jealous, I feel much more motivated to push myself further.Freddy Kuiva, Estonia
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