How To Practice Guitar To Increase Speed While Becoming A Total Package Musician In The Process

You set yourself up for frustration by only practicing guitar for speed in isolation from other areas of your guitar playing.

This leads to common problems such as:

· Having great technique but no ability to play with good phrasing (making solos sound like robotic exercises instead of music)

· Not knowing how to use notes over the right chords to build and release tension

· Getting lost while playing guitar licks or solos because you don’t know what to play next or rely too much on pre-constructed licks

· Having poor creativity, so your guitar solos sound repetitive

· Having poor rhythmic timing, so your solos sound out of sync

You develop faster guitar speed AND become a killer musician (avoiding the problems above) by integrating speed practice with other areas of your playing.

This ensures that you learn how to use the speed and technical skill you develop without neglecting other areas of your playing. This results in improving multiple skills at once, so you become the total package as a guitarist and musician much faster.

Use these tips to integrate guitar speed practice with other areas of your playing:

Tip #1: Learn How To Make Any Note Sound Good With Any Expressive Technique

Being able to play guitar with speed is only one tool in your musical expression toolbox.

Knowing how to use any guitar technique to make any note sound great makes you a more complete musician and gives you the ability to freely expression emotion with your instrument.

This video shows you how to dissect a guitar solo and improve it note-by-note using creative technique:

Improve your ability to play killer notes using technique creatively by:

· Practicing phrasing with just a few notes at a time.

· Practicing things like scales and arpeggios while integrating them with other guitar techniques like vibrato or bends (rather than just practicing them in isolation).

Tip #2: Make Your Guitar Solos More Expressive By Developing A Great Ear

You give yourself more time to think while soloing when you have the ability to “hear” notes in your head before you play them. You also gain the ability to play lead guitar ideas that express exactly the emotion you wanted to express.

Knowing how notes sound in your head helps you clearly express and communicate emotion on guitar as explained in this video:

Practice developing a better ear on guitar by:

· Listening to how the notes of a scale sound over a chord while slowly adding notes over span of octave

· Improvising over one or more chords and listening carefully to how different notes sound over different chords

· Learning about how chords work together with a teacher (if needed)

· Playing single notes with tremolo picking to practice guitar for speed and ear training at the same time

Additionally, being able to hear notes before you play them helps you play guitar with speed without getting lost or stuck because your mind hasn’t caught up yet.

Tip #3: Train Your Rhythmic Timing By Focusing On Important Notes At First

Playing with poor timing makes your guitar soloing sound amateur (especially at fast speeds).

Good news is, training yourself to play in time isn’t difficult. A great way to do it is to begin by focusing on playing the most memorable notes in a phrase perfectly, then working on the rest.

What are the most memorable notes in a phrase? In many cases, these notes are the first and last notes, because they leave the strongest initial impression on the listener.

Practice your timing by:

1. Thinking of a short, fast guitar lick that can be played over and over.

2. Practicing the lick to a metronome while focusing on timing the first and last note perfectly on the beat (so that the beat disappears under the note).

3. Playing the entire lick while recording it. Then seeing how many times you can play it perfectly in time, note-for-note (using recording software to hear and see any mistakes).

This not only trains you to play with better timing, but trains you to improve your clean guitar speed as well.

Tip #4: Make Your Licks And Solos More Interesting By Training Your Rhythmic Creativity

Learning how to play with a wide variety of note rhythms gives you more expressive options as a guitarist so you make your guitar solos sound more creative (compared to most players who use the same rhythms most of the time).

1. While improvising, challenge yourself to only play using a specific note rhythm such as eighth notes, sixteenth notes, triplet eighth notes or dotted quarter notes.

2. Do this for a couple of minutes.

3. Then add a new note rhythm that you can use in addition to the first one.

Get creative and add different rhythms you might not think about usually. Over time, this trains you to step outside of your comfort zone and use a variety of rhythms for your note choices.

Now you have many ideas for how to practice guitar speed and phrasing at the same time. Learn how to double your current guitar speed while practicing 50% less with this free guide to fast guitar playing.