How To Play Fast & Clean String Skipping Speed Guitar Licks

How To Make Faster Guitar Playing 100% Tight

Often we play just a little in front of or after the beat. This produces guitar playing that doesn't sound very good.

This just signifies you need to train becoming more tight with your rhythm. Timing is a very essential skill you will need to develop, notably for playing in bands and/or doing any kind of studio recording.

So, what do you do when you need to get a lot better at playing with great timing (tighter)?

First action is to find a steady beat to play over.

The optimal way to improve at it is to work at recording yourself with a metronome and listen back to whatever you played.

Monitor for problems in your timing.

As you learn to hear where the timing issues happen, it is pretty painless to repair your mistakes and play very tight.

Note: Don't use lots of guitar effects such as flange, chorus or reverb when you are seriously practicing.

These types of effects often mask flaws in your guitar playing (such as poor articulation for instance) and you don't improve them. Also, when playing fast, if there is some effect being used with your distortion, it becomes tough to make out all the notes making your playing sound more unclean than it really is.

Tip: How To Play With Insane Guitar Speed Without Taking Forever

To push your guitar speed to the edge take a very small segment of any scale pattern, arpeggio, or etude and play it at a much faster speed than you can play the full phrase at.

For instance, if you are playing this exercise at 125 bpm, try these small fragments at 5 bpm more.

This will sync both your hands and your mind accustomed to faster speeds but still keep it very simple for you to play (since you are only using a handful of notes at a time).

Then progressively extend the segment until you are developing the total guitar part at that upper tempo.

Needless to say, when doing this don't permit your 2 hand sync to get poor at the speedier speeds. Work on this by double picking the notes at a much slower speed.

Guitar Playing Drill For Getting Faster & Squeeky Clean

Pay attention to listening your mistakes while playing at faster speeds.

For instance, when you are playing a single string lick at or near your fastest speed and see that your hands aren't in sync, you need to be able to see which note( s) are not clean as you are actively playing.

To do that, your focus needs to become much more polished.

Work on breaking up challenging guitar licks into much smaller blocks of a few notes at once. Then work on these few notes at your max speed. This makes it a lot easier to find your mistakes.

Another method that will help you during faster passages (most notably with legato) is to move between faster playing and slower, more lyrical playing numerous times (in 10 second spans).

When you only play fast for several minutes at a time, gradually your hand becomes tired and your technique gets sloppy (strengthening bad habits).

So if you go back and forth between slow and fast playing in short bursts of focus you get the chance to change your muscle memory by going over the right slow technical motions before playing again at your fastest speed.

This trains your muscles to learn the proper motions in no time and ingrain them into your top speeds.

As you start to improve your listening, you will begin hearing the exact missteps you make at your fastest speeds (with all the things you are able to play) and you know how to correct them.
 

Note: Begin studying with a guitar teacher over learning by yourself.

It's extremely easy to find yourself stuck in your musical journey and unaware of what you should do to improve without someone with experience to instruct you.

This makes learning guitar feel tedious and demotivating rather than exciting - just like it ought to be.

This reason is why I strongly recommend all guitarists take lessons with an excellent guitar teacher.

This is very valuable for helping you make bursts of progress, because a fantastic guitar teacher is successful at getting you to spot where you are going down the wrong path, deal with any existing ineffective habits and get new information about playing guitar that you might not have learned about if you learned totally by yourself.

Not only does this make practicing guitar more enjoyable, it makes it a lot less frustrating. Additionally, you become a kickass guitarist, very quickly.

When you are set to reach a new level of skill in your guitar playing, I can help you with this in my personalized Breakthrough Guitar Lessons.

I have given music instruction for multiple decades to thousands of guitar players and am very proud of the musical results I have had the opportunity to get for them.

This is what a few killer guitarists say about taking guitar lessons: