3 Fast Guitar Licks To Work On When You Don't Have Much Time To Practice
Don’t have a lot of time to practice guitar, but want to get faster? No problem.
Practicing the right fast guitar licks in an efficient manner helps you quickly gain speed, become a better overall player and improve your guitar playing creativity.
Sound good? Thought so!
Use the 3 fast guitar licks below to improve many areas of your technique and become the kickass shredder you always wanted to be:
Guitar Lick #1: Kickass Scale Memorizing Pattern
What can you do to play blazing fast guitar runs up and down the neck at will?
Improve your picking efficiency and memorize scale patterns all over the fretboard.
Sound hard?
Actually, it’s not as hard as you think.
In fact: it’s fun to learn new scale patterns and expand your soloing options so you never get lost while soloing anywhere on the fretboard.
The key is to improve your picking efficiency and practice modes in small bursts of notes.
Exercise: Stop Getting Lost While Soloing By Developing Better Fretboard Memorization
1. Practice improvising for a minute using just the first three notes of the C Major pattern.
2. Then, add the next 3 notes of the pattern and improvise for another minute.
3. Add the last two notes and repeat.
4. This time, repeat step one and add the first three notes of the Dorian pattern (so you have the first three of C Major and the first three of D Dorian).
5. Repeat step two and add the second three notes of the Dorian pattern.
6. Repeat step three while improvising with all the notes of the C Major and D Dorian patterns.
7. Repeat this process using Dorian + Phrygian (instead of Major + Dorian).
8. Finally, improvise freely with all three mode patterns.
To get even more benefit from this kind of practice, work on your picking technique at the same time.
How?
By making it as efficient as possible for faster and cleaner speed.
Guitar Lick #2: Sweep Picking Arpeggio With Power
Sweep picking is much easier than you think it is!
The movements of sweep picking are less complicated than other techniques, so once you get used to them – it becomes second nature.
Keep in mind:
You just need to get a good grasp of the timing between your hands, then all you are doing is moving your picking hand in a straight line and making small movements in your fretting hand to keep notes from ringing together.
THIS is the part people struggle with.
Fortunately, there are many ways to make this part easier.
One of them is to use heavy picking power and tremolo
picking to articulate individual notes in an arpeggio.
This helps you focus on perfecting one note at a time, removing the overwhelming frustration that comes from making multiple mistakes within an overall arpeggio pattern.
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Practice this arpeggio lick using heavy picking power.
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Break it down into 2 string segments if needed – this improves your ability to focus.
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Play with tremolo picking not just on the final notes, but on any given note to improve its quality.
Get more help to play sweep picking arpeggios with cleanliness, speed and
articulation:
This video shows you how to make your tremolo picking technique as efficient and fast as possible so you get the most results from this exercise:
Guitar Lick #3: Creative Technique Integration Lick
One of the most powerful approaches for improving guitar speed is learning how to combine different skills together. Integrating skills helps you play guitar fast in an effortless manner, rather than having to take the time to stop and think about each skill separately.
This approach should be used with everything you learn to supercharge your progress.
A very powerful and common way to integrate techniques together is to combine scales with arpeggios.
This helps your guitar solos flow effortlessly so your scales and arpeggios sound musical, rather than like “exercises”.
Now you know some great guitar licks to help you get faster and cleaner on guitar even if you only have 15-30 minutes to practice.