How To Play Guitar Fast And Easy By Becoming Extremely Efficient

Playing guitar fast is about moving your hands faster, right?

Wrong!

This is a huge mental mistake guitar players make that keeps them from developing super-fast speed.

Here’s the secret to killer guitar speed:

It’s about moving efficiently.

The more efficient you make every aspect of your guitar technique, the easier it becomes to play guitar fast with very little effort.

Use the tips below to play guitar faster and cleaner with extremely efficient technique:

Start Making Your Hand Movement Efficient Instead Of Just “Faster”

Moving your hands faster doesn’t translate to faster and cleaner guitar playing. Instead, you should be making your movement more efficient in both hands.

Efficiency of motion removes wasted movement, meaning it takes less time to perform the actions needed to play a note. Less time = faster.

Here is how to move both hands more efficiently so your guitar playing is faster and cleaner than ever:

How To Make Your Fretting Hand More Efficient

Only your lifting fingers slightly away from the guitar in between playing notes

For example: While lifting your fingers away from the fretboard (after playing a note), focus on lifting them away only several centimeters.

This may take time to ingrain into your technique since most guitarists waste a lot of energy moving their fingers away several inches or more.

Use Efficient Movement for patterns

While playing various patterns on the fretboard, look for ways to move the shortest distance from one fret to the next.

This means, pay attention to which fingers you use to fret notes.

For example, while playing a standard open C major chord by itself, you probably wouldn’t use your middle finger to fret to the first fret of the B string, your ring finger on the second fret of the D string and your pinky on the third fret of the A string.

Generally speaking, there are all kinds of bad habits that stick around when it comes to fretting notes using fingerings we are used to, but that aren’t optimal or efficient.

Examine your guitar playing and focus on using fingerings that create the least amount of tension in your hands and waste as little movement as possible while moving to whichever note or lick comes next.

Don’t use too much pressure to fret notes

Only use as much pressure as needed to get a note to sound while fretting.

The following video shows you how to train this:

Using less energy in this area prevents you from making tension-based mistakes while also minimizing the risk of physical energy in the future.

This concept is easily practiced by simply warming up with any practice item you are about to work on, and using as little pressure as needed to play the notes. Do this before every practice session and eventually it becomes second nature.

How To Make Your Picking Hand More Efficient

Picking harder with a heavy pick

Pick the strings with POWER.

This slices the pick right through them, minimizing the time the pick spends in contact with the strings. It also has the added benefit of
making your notes sound clearer and more articulate.

Plus, it helps you keep both hands in sync so fast guitar playing sounds more smooth and clean.

Use efficient General Picking technique

This video shows you how to use efficient guitar picking technique to make fast playing cleaner and more effortless than
ever before:

Practice this a little bit each day using the chromatic exercise example from the video. Then, slowly incorporate this more and more into your everyday playing.

This way, you don’t have to start from square one (losing all your speed).

Stay in straight line while sweeping

While playing arpeggios, the picking hand often starts to mimic the movement in the fretting hand. This causes you to move slightly at an angle as you sweep the strings.

This similar to trying to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time.

Focus on watching your picking hand while sweeping to make sure it moves directly, in a straight line to pick the strings.

Ending note: Eliminate extra tension from everything you play

Having a lot of tension in your body leads to sloppy mistakes.

Taking the time to relax and find tension in your neck, arms, hands, shoulders, back, etc. helps you become aware of where tension builds up (so you can mentally focus on relaxing).

Investing just a minute or two into relaxing common areas of tension in your body goes a long way towards not only making guitar playing more enjoyable, but eliminating subtle causes of sloppy mistakes that you would’ve never thought to look for.

Applying the concepts in this article has a massively beneficial effect on your guitar speed and accuracy.

However, this is not the end of the story.

Want to learn how to double your guitar speed, right away?

It’s easier than you think!

Learn how to do it right now by downloading this free guitar speed resource.