How To Easily Play Fast Metal Guitar Licks That You’ve Been Struggling With For A Long Time

Nothing feels better than finally being able to play that fast metal guitar lick you always wanted to play, but struggled with for so long. There are several ways to speed up this process so you save countless hours of frustration and enjoy practicing much more.

Here are 3 creative licks that make fast metal guitar licks easier to play when you practice them:

Creative Lick #1: Unique Scale Memorization Pattern

Want to play guitar solos that flow smoothly from note to note?

The secret is excellent fretboard memorization.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds.

It’s easy 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.

Try This Drill To Prevent Yourself From Becoming Lost When Soloing

1. Practice improvising for a minute using just the first three notes of the E Minor scale.

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 D Mixolydian pattern (so you have the first three of E Minor and the first three of D Mixolydian).

5. Repeat step two and add the second three notes of the Mixolydian pattern.

6. Repeat step three while improvising with all the notes of the E Minor and D Mixolydian patterns.

7. Repeat this process using D Mixolydian + C Lydian (instead of Minor + Mixolydian).

8. Finally, improvise freely with all three scale patterns.

Watch this video to learn how to make your picking hand movement as efficient as possible:

Guitar Playing Tip For Quickly Moving To Higher Scale Positions

It’s common while playing guitar at fast speeds and moving to higher positions that people miss the note they were supposed to slide/move up to. For example, by playing the note one fret lower than the one that should have been played.

The solution for this is to keep your eyes focused on the note you will be sliding up to while your hands are still playing the notes in your current position.

This helps you to become more confident with connecting scales, runs or any shape in different positions on the guitar.

Creative Lick #2: Play Guitar Arpeggios By Picking With More Force

It is a lot easier to play sweep picking arpeggios than most people think.

Sweep pick requires less movement then many other techniques. This may seem hard at first, but it quickly becomes easy with time.

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.

Try these things while playing arpeggios:

· Make sure to pick with a lot of force.

· Make it easier to focus on each note by practicing in two to three note segments.

· Use speed picking to isolate difficult notes.

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:

How To Keep The Notes Of Your Arpeggios From Bleeding Together

Muting in your fretting hand is critical for clean sweep picking arpeggios.

Mute by slightly releasing the pressure from each finger after the note has been played and you are moving onto the next string.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean to lift your finger up to where it is entirely off the fretboard, it just means to relax its pressure from the string just enough to mute the note as soon as the next note starts to ring.

Creative Lick #3: Combine Your Skills Together With This Lick

Integrating your skills together is one of the best ways to make fast progress in your guitar playing. This helps you play guitar fast with ease, instead of needing to concentrate on each skill individually.

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 leads flow effortlessly so your scales and arpeggios sound musical, rather than like “exercises”.

This video shows you an example of a guitar lick that how combines scales with arpeggios:

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.

Learn more creative ways to improve your guitar playing by checking out this resource for performing cathartic guitar runs.