How To Get Faster On Guitar By Eliminating Causes To Slow & Sloppy Playing

Playing with fast guitar speed feels amazing, but only when you are able to do it without making sloppy mistakes.


Big problem is:


The majority of guitar players aren’t even aware of the mistakes they are making that slow them down, prevent them from playing faster or add sloppy mistakes into their playing.


Good news is, you are about to learn what the most common mistakes are and how to avoid them so you play guitar fast and clean like never before.


Fix these common mistakes to do it:

 

Mistake #1: Being Inefficient In Your Technique


Having inefficient guitar technique makes playing guitar fast feel like a struggle, when it should feel totally effortless and easy.


Making just a few changes to the efficiency of movement in your hands makes all the difference and isn’t hard to do.


Correct these inefficient aspects of guitar playing to make playing with speed feel easier:


PICKING HAND


·         While picking strings involved in patterns that move from one string to the next: You’re unconsciously moving your picking hand a little to the left or right during string transitions.

Eliminate unneeded movement in your picking by keeping it in a direct line as you pick through the string. Watch your hand as you pick.

·         Only muting notes using palm muting.

Instead, use your thumb to mute strings below the one you are playing on. This eliminates needing to change your hand position for palm muting.

·         You try to speed pick using faster motion in your hand.

Use the smallest picking motions possible while speed picking so the pick strikes the string as many times as possible in a given period of time.

Here is an example of how to use efficient picking technique during scales:

FRETTING HAND


·         You use fretting hand finger positions that feel easy even if they aren’t very efficient (example: using your ring finger to play a note rather than your pinky).

Always look for fretting hand finger positions that require the least amount of movement.

·         Your fingers fly up and away from the fretboard (by 3+ inches) as you play notes.

Practice minimizing how high your fingers are lifted away from the fretboard to get rid of this unneeded movement.

You fret the notes of an arpeggio that are on the same fret, but adjacent strings using your finger tips.

Use rolling technique to play notes that are on the same fret of two adjacent strings, like shown here:

Mistake #2: Building Up Too Much Tension In Your Body


Sloppy guitar playing mistakes are often created from subtle, yet not unimportant levels of tension in your body.


This particularly applies to your fingers and hands, but is not limited to these areas.


Before practicing, take just a few minutes to find and relax tension in your body. This ensures that playing guitar with fast speed feels much easier.

For just a few minutes, do the following exercise:


1. Choose any guitar lick you’d like to work on.


2. Choose up to 5 notes from the exercise.


3. Play the notes continually. At the end of each repetition, pause for a few seconds. As you do this, relax these parts of your body before repeating the notes again:


·         Wrists

·         Fretting hand fingers (fret with only as much pressure as needed)

·         Picking hand fingers

·         Neck

·         Back

·         Chest

·         Shoulders

·         Arms

Doing this for just a few minutes a day removes tension in your body that causes mistakes and makes playing guitar feel much easier overall.

 

Mistake #3: Only Practicing Technique In Isolation From Other Areas Of Your Playing

 

Guitarists who like playing fast often end up practicing guitar exercises outside of any musical context.


For instance: practicing a scale over and over to a metronome.


Problem is, practicing like this doesn’t help guitar players learn how to play great solos, because it isolates technique from any kind of musical context.

Don’t make this same mistake!


Practice applying everything you learn into a musical context in addition to mastering it in isolation from other areas of your playing.

This narrows the gap between your raw speed and usable speed.


Here are a few ways to do this:


·         Improvise freely or over a backing track using the practice item you are working on.

·         Make guitar phrasing mastery one of your top priorities

·         Combine different areas of your guitar playing together to create your own exercises, such as using scale/arpeggio patterns together, adding vibrato to your bends, tremolo picking arpeggios, etc.


You now understand how to overcome three common mistakes that keep guitarists from playing fast and clean like they want (so you can too!).


However, did you know that you can both: practice less and get faster in less time?


It’s true!


Discover how to do it by checking out this free guitar speed practice resource.