How To Play Guitar With Crazy Speed By Training Your Hands To Stay In Sync
Want to play guitar with speed that impresses anyone?
Getting both hands in perfect sync together gives you the ability to play with shred speed that feels easy and effortless.
Good news:
This is easy to learn. Anyone can be trained to have excellent two-hand synchronization for guitar.
Sound good? Great!
Play guitar with faster and more consistent speed than ever before using the free advice in this video:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Here are a few more tips on how to get your hands in sync for faster guitar playing:
Guitar Speed Tip #1: Use Directional Picking
What is directional picking? It’s where you pick using alternate picking on a single string. But when you change strings, move the pick in the direction of the string change. Meaning: when ascending to a higher (thinner) string, use a downstroke. (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.
Guitar Speed Tip #2: Use Thumb Muting To Clean Up Sloppy String Noise
This helps you keep your playing clean, even when you play with a lot of distortion.
Simply rest your picking hand’s thumb on the lower (in pitch) strings to keep them from ringing out.
Guitar Speed Tip #3: Spend Some Time Practicing Unplugged
This forces you to pick the notes harder and improves your articulation. And your articulation helps your hands to stay in sync, even when you play fast.
Now you know how to play guitar faster and make your guitar speed sound clean. The next step?
It’s now time to transform the rest of your guitar playing. And I'm not just talking about your guitar technique & speed, but also:
…music theory, aural skills, phrasing, fretboard visualization, rhythm playing and other skills you need to:
Finally Put It All Together And Feel Like A Real Musician (Not Just A Guitar Player)!
I can help you with this in my personalized Breakthrough Guitar Lessons.
Your guitar lessons with me are not a fixed course. You and I work together for as long as it takes to make you the guitarist you want to be.
When we start, you’ll fill out a long evaluation from – telling me everything about your musical skill level, guitar playing background, previous lesson experience (if any) and of course…
… your short & long-term musical goals.
From there, I go to work for you.
I study your evaluation from in detail and I create a lesson plan for reaching your goals, based on what you tell me about yourself.
Next, I design a lesson strategy for you for the next 3-6 months and put together your actual lesson materials.
Your lesson materials are your actual exercises, drills and etudes that develop your skills and help you reach your goals.
All you need to do is practice what I tell you.
How much time should you practice? Most of my guitar students practice 30-60 minutes per day. Obviously the more you practice, the better. But even if you practice just 30 minutes per day, you can make a surprising amount of progress.
In between the lessons, I give you a ton of support to help you absorb and practice your lessons.
You can get help and support from me, by:
- Attending weekly office hours (where you can ask me questions and get help from me live on video). I go live on Zoom every week and make myself available to you and my other students, to answer your questions.
- Attending live classes that I do every month. 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.
- Sending me feedback about each lesson. This way I know exactly how you are progressing and can answer your questions when you are stuck on something.
- Sending me recordings of your playing for feedback. This tells me how well you are progressing and shows me what you need the most help on.
- Asking me questions when you get stuck. (You can email me anytime day or night.)
- Updating your guitar practice journal on my student forum, so I can see exactly how you are practicing from day to day.
- Asking for additional help on the forum from my other top students (many of them are professional guitar teachers whom I trained to teach guitar).
The more items from this list you do, the faster you improve. (That means you need fewer lessons to reach your goals.)
The fewer of these things you do, the slower you improve. (That means you need fewer lessons to reach your goals.)
From all of these things, I can track your progress and adjust your lesson strategy as needed.
(Note, by the way, that the amount of time you practice is only one tiny piece of the equation).
Not to mention:
Your goals may very well change over time (this would be totally normal). If and when this happens, I revise your lesson strategy yet again.
That’s why it’s impossible for me to predict an “end” point before we even start working together and I get to know you.
Here are the results you can expect when you apply what I teach you in your guitar playing:
“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
Want to start getting the same results in your guitar playing today? To begin, click the “start now” button on the banner below to learn more.