Want to play amazing string skipping guitar licks with clean and fast speed?
The way most people try to perform fast picking guitar licks fails.
Why?
They simply focus on moving their hands faster to pick rather than tackling the core issue:
Efficiency.
Efficient movement = fast and clean guitar technique.
Learn how to play guitar faster and cleaner than ever using the string skipping demonstration in this video:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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.
“Before I took lessons with Tom Hess, I wanted to learn how to do some sweep picking and I also wanted to fill in a few gaps that I thought I might’ve had in my playing. And also I was feeling a little bit frustrated with not knowing where to take my playing. I didn’t really know how to get better. I felt like I reached a plateau, so that’s why I sought out Tom.”
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I’ve had a few other guitar teachers before I took lessons with Tom, and most of them weren’t very good. And after reading a few articles online that Tom had written, I could tell that this guy was going to be the teacher for me.
The biggest thing that I really like is the actual guitar lessons themselves. I’m finding that I’m learning new things that I never even considered every single time I get a lesson. Something new to apply to my playing each time. But of course, I really enjoy the forum as well, because thanks to the lessons with Tom, I’ve been able to meet people from all over the world who have similar experiences and similar goals, so that’s been really motivating as well.
Before I took lessons with Tom I really didn’t like improvisation. I knew scales, and I knew kind of how they applied over chord progressions, but I just didn’t like it. Since taking lessons with Tom, some of the lessons are focused on that specific issue, and now I feel really comfortable about getting up in front of people and playing over any type of… in any key any backing track, I feel pretty comfortable doing that.
Tom actually knows what my goals are and gives me specific lessons that will help me achieve those goals. Other teachers that I’ve had before just do it their way… it’s either their way or the highway. And they don’t really care about what I wanted to do, and they didn’t really listen, and they didn’t really look into what I was doing or what my interests were and didn’t really play into that.
It’s really motivating to get to know people who are also students of Tom. It’s really good to have positive-minded musicians around even if I’m just talking to them online, or if I meet them in person, either way it’s still really motivating.
The forum has helped me because I am able to ask any music theory related questions or technique questions and I get those answered very very quickly. And I also like to participate in discussions and help share my knowledge as well with other people, which when I do that I feel that it’s reinforcing the things that I know as well, so it helps with my music theory knowledge when I share as well.
Greg Trotter, Melbourne, Australia
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When I started learning from Tom, the main thing that made him different from other teachers was that he was showing me how to excel in all aspects of my guitar playing by applying the skills that I already knew together with the new material that I was learning from him.
He made me aware of both strengths and weaknesses in my playing that I did not even know I had. From there he gave me the knowledge, tools and guidance to literally transform my guitar playing by enabling me to overcome things that were preventing me from becoming a truly creative and self-expressive guitar player. These were the kinds of things that none of my previous guitar teachers and books I studied were able to do for me.
After Tom made me aware of all the things I was missing in my guitar playing and provided me with the strategy and tools for solving them, I began to make very fast progress in all areas of my guitar playing.
I can now write my own music and can create lead guitar solos that I am happy and fulfilled with. I also have the technical skills to confidently and easily play anything that I want to express. I have overcome all of the lead guitar challenges that I struggled with before, and increased my guitar speed to virtuoso levels. More importantly, I have the knowledge and understanding of how to continually improve my guitar playing and musical skills to higher and higher levels to continue expressing myself with my music. Overall, I have definitely transformed in a huge way as a musician and as a person through my lessons with Tom Hess. I am grateful to him for guiding me towards becoming the guitarist I always wanted to be!"
Mike Philippov, Indiana, USA
“Tom was my first guitar teacher ever. I started online guitar lessons a couple of years ago and it’s what I’ve been looking for. Someone who can really help me get what I want.”
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Tom really puts it back on me to decide what I want and do what I need to do to get that. That’s what so many people need when they need help - they need to know how to help themselves.
There’s abundant resources. You can always get more information. You can always get more help, especially from other people, other students, members on the forum... Most of all, it’s an opportunity for me to help myself. That’s the goal.
When I pick up something that I haven’t played for a long time with my new technique... wow, it feels different. There are plenty of songs (I’ve always played in a cover band, so I know tons of songs). There are songs I haven’t played for 5, 10, 15, 20 years... and if I pulled them up and played them, they would still feel the same way they did back them. But now, if I pull up and play a song I haven’t played in forever – Oh my God, wow! My hands do this now.
Rob Hiemstra, Toronto, Canada
“You’re dealing with one of the best guitar teachers in the world, maybe the best and you can’t get that just anywhere in the world.”
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Tom is so goal focused, and I hadn’t even thought of that, it changed the way I thought of things. Tom makes you come up with musical goals and works towards fulfilling those goals. You have something to focus on, the lessons are based on meeting those goals. You’re getting better, you can see how you’re getting better and then you build new goals after that. You see the growth and development as opposed to just getting a little better at a certain technique. You’re actually developing.
Mike Larson, Milwaukee, USA
Now it's time for you to become an amazing overall lead guitar player. Get started now. Work together with me as your guitar teacher by taking online guitar lessons.