3 Ways Constantly Playing Guitar Too Fast Harms Your Playing & How To Effectively Use Speed To Enhance Your Soloing
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a guitarist is thinking you have to play guitar fast all the time. This mindset makes your guitar solos sound less creative, causes mistakes and holds you back from becoming a great overall musician.
Changing your mindset from playing guitar fast all the time to playing as expressively as possible makes a massive difference in your playing. This means you start thinking of ways to utilize speed to express yourself rather than simply demonstrate technical ability.
Result: Your guitar playing begins sounding great and becomes emotionally engaging for others to listen to. This makes people stop and say to themselves, “Wow, that person is a killer guitarist!”
1. There Is No Time To Process And Correct Sloppy Mistakes
It’s a common guitar playing mistake to continually play at
fast speeds even when you aren’t ready for them. Guitarists often get so over
anxious about improving that they never take the time to learn techniques the
right way.
This results in fast, but perpetually sloppy guitar playing.
The solution is to dedicate practice time to finding and fixing problems in your guitar technique at both slow and fast speeds.
Correct guitar mistakes at slow speeds
by:
Practicing a technique or note in a phrase slowly while making sure you are using efficient motion in your picking hand, minimal pressure in your fretting hand (just enough to sound the note), minimal tension in your body, proper muting technique between both hands and solid two hand synchronization.
Correct guitar mistakes at fast speeds by:
Practicing small segments of licks or patterns (3-5 notes max) by repeating them at a very fast speed. Insert a brief moment of rest in between each repetition to mentally process any mistakes you made. Then adjust to correct the mistake(s) in the next few repetitions.
2. Guitar Solos Feel Like They Are Rushed
Seek to use your guitar speed as a tool for emotional expression rather than just a gimmick or a way to show off your technical skills.
Additionally, think about the chords you are soloing over to
determine appropriate times for speed and appropriate times for slower, melodic
phrases.
Think about how your soloing builds and releases tension. Speed becomes an excellent expressive tool when you use it to build tension.
For example:
While playing over an A minor chord progression of Am – Dm – E, the most “tense” chord is the E (V) chord. In this case, it would generally make the most sense to play more slowly and melodic over the first two chords, then speed up over the E chord to build tension and release it again when the Am chord repeats.
3. It Can Limit Guitar
Soloing Creativity
Shredders who only play fast frequently sacrifice memorable melodies for technical-sounding flurries of notes. This usually involves constantly moving onto to different notes rather than squeezing as much expressive potential as possible out of every note choice.
Practice improvising with just a few notes at a time in order to squeeze as much expressive value as you can out of them. This helps you stop wasting notes while soloing and begins to change your mental focus towards playing guitar solos with excellent phrasing.
Here are several great ways to squeeze emotional expressive out of a note:
·
Use different kinds of vibrato (wide, narrow,
slow, fast)
·
Use different types of bends (full, half,
pre-bend, bend and release, slow, immediate)
·
Emphasize a note by embellishing it with slides
or other legato techniques.
Take a few minutes to improvise using only one note and see how many different ways you can play using the techniques above. This trains you to play guitar solos expressively, so you start making every note count.
By mastering the ideas in this article, your fast guitar solos improve because they become more musically expressive. Integrate these ideas into your weekly practice schedule to make progress in this area fast.