How Long Does It Take To Play Guitar Fast? 4 Reasons Why It Doesn’t Take Years To Get Faster

How long does it take to play guitar fast? The answer depends on your musical goals, but is generally: “not too fast” (from a few weeks to less than a year).

Many guitarists frustrate themselves thinking that it will be many years before they can every play fast and clean… this causes them to quit practicing altogether.

Here are 4 reasons why it doesn’t take as long to play guitar fast as you think (and why it isn’t important anyway):

How Fast You Increase Guitar Speed Depends On The Quality Of Your Practice, Not Quantity

Thinking about getting faster on guitar can be frustrating when you imagine yourself years away from your speed goals. Fortunately, gaining speed is about HOW you practice, not just how much you practice. This is why so many guitarists fail to make speed gains despite practicing many hours a day.

It’s possible to get huge results for your guitar playing speed even with limited time to practice per day. The first step to take is determining the specific goals you have. Then determine the specific items/skills you need to practice to reach them.

With this in place, use the time you have every day to work on skills that help you improve in multiple areas at once.

For example: practicing playing a scale over and over for 30 minutes helps you improve skills like picking technique and two hand synchronization. However, practicing scales while improvising helps you develop these same skills AND learn how to use them while soloing.

Making efficient practice choices like this makes the difference between being able to solo with speed and being frustrated because you never learned how to use your skills musically (requiring months of practice or more to get to the level you want to be at).

Learn more ways to improve your guitar playing fast by reading this article about practicing guitar effectively and efficiently. This drastically reduces how long it takes you to play guitar fast like you want.

You Enjoy Playing And Improve Faster By Focusing On The Improvement Process

Constantly focusing on the end goal/top speed takes you out of the moment while practicing. Most of your guitar playing consists of the work you do to get to your goals. It’s better to enjoy this, so you enjoy the majority of your time spent playing guitar.

Too many guitar players allow their guitar practice to become a boring chore. This is the time you should be enjoying most. Getting better at guitar is about enjoying the process of getting better, struggling and overcoming challenges.

At any moment, you are just one or two practice sessions from a breakthrough.

Create your guitar practice schedule based not just on mastery of skills, but on exercises you enjoy. Make it one of your biggest goals to make your practice time as fun as possible and watch as you get results faster than you thought possible.

Constantly Burning Up And Down The Fretboard Isn’t The Only Way To Play Guitar Fast

It’s a common mistake to think you must constantly showcase your highest guitar speed while soloing or playing licks. This is what causes so many guitarists to become very technical, but lack a sense of feeling in their soloing.

Meaning: their guitar playing just sounds like a mess of fast notes.

Playing guitar with tons of speed is possible without continually burning up and down the fretboard every chance you get. Instead, use speed as something to compliment the things you play, like adding a spice to a tasty dish.

This is easy to do now, even when you haven’t achieved lightning fast speeds in all areas of your playing just yet. Simply do the following:

Invest 10 minutes per day into improvising. Do this by creating a short 3-5 note phrase from any lick or scale and work on playing variations of it using elements like rhythm or techniques like vibrato to make it interesting.

Get as much expression from every note as possible.

By limited the number of notes you play with, it is easier to use speed in a more creative manner rather than falling into the trap of cramming as much notes into every phrase as possible.

Start soloing more creatively while still playing fast using the tips in these free guitar phrasing resources.

Playing Guitar Fast Is Relative To Specific Goals And Techniques

Playing guitar at 1,000 notes per minute sounds incredibly fast right? This is actually a fairly vague goal to have… and it might be preventing you from getting faster. This speed is fast in a general sense, but not necessarily difficult depending on the technique being used to play the notes.

For example:

·         Playing a two-hand tapping lick that contains 3 notes is pretty easy to do at 1,000 notes per minute.

·         Playing three note per string scales at this speed is much more difficult.

You are likely already able to play many things very fast. The first step to truly increasing your guitar speed is determining which specific things you struggle with (rather than being worried about not being “fast enough” in a vague sense).

Here’s what to do:

1.   Get help for finding the subtle mistakes and weaknesses that hold your playing back by taking lessons with a great guitar teacher.

2.   Focus on improving your usable speed versus raw speed. In other words, work on being able to use speed to play musical things like solos and licks versus simply being able to burn up and down a scale over and over.

3.   Understand that most people don’t care about the specific speed (in beats per minute) that you play at… only that your playing sounds interesting or expressive. So, get started improving your guitar phrasing now and grow into a better overall musician as more speed comes over time.