What Are Some Good Techniques To Develop Speed On A Guitar

What questions do we have today? What? I said guitar questions, not Mopar questions – I don’t know much about cars, besides that you need a key to start them. Here’s an easy one, red (your welcome Tiffany from Three Forks, Montana). Here’s a question (and it’s about guitar): What are some good techniques to develop speed on a guitar?

Before we get started I just want to state that I am not a speed player. My favorite guitarists are mostly not speedy players. Not to say I haven’t tried to be a speed demon. I was in a band that the other guitarist was a fantastic soloist that was all about the slow burn. The only way I could differentiate myself from him was to fly around the fretboard with as much theatrics as I could muster. Which wasn’t much if I’m being honest (that’s why he took most of the solos).

Slow Down

If you want to get faster on guitar the first thing you need to do is slow down. No one hits the ground running, you need to learn how to walk first. Speed naturally come from knowing how to play a line, part, or piece.

Play the part at a slower tempo until you can play it flawlessly, then start to speed it up. This might even mean breaking the part or song down to smaller pieces to learn it. Learn each piece until you have the whole, then you can start to speed it up. There is no point in being able to play only half the song/solo/part at tempo, and not being able to do the rest.

Repetition

Keep playing the piece over and over and over and over and over…you get the idea. Play it so much that you can do it effortlessly. Once the part becomes so easy that you don’t have to think to play it, then you can start focusing on making it more musical. Just because something is fast doesn’t mean it has to be emotionless.

Practice, practice, and then practice some more. Nothing works better to increase your speed then to keep playing. Time spent practicing is time well spent getting you ready to play whether it is in a jam type setting or in front of an audience. Things that you learn to do effortlessly in practice will show up when you are performing.

Technique

Some techniques just sound faster or at least lend themselves to being played fast. Sweep picking is just such an example. If you don’t know what sweep picking is it is defined as “playing consecutive strings with a sweeping motion of the pick while using the fretting hand to produce a specific series of notes that are fast and fluid in sound” on Wikipedia. There are plenty of examples you can hear on YouTube. This sounds fast with very little effort. I’ll admit I’ll be practicing this after I finish answering this question.

Tapping also sounds real fast. The Wikipedia definition is: “a guitar playing technique, where a string is fretted and set into vibration as part of a single motion of being pushed onto the fretboard, as opposed to the standard technique being fretted with one hand and picked with the other.” Eddie Van Halen launched a million solos with his tapping technique. The downside of this technique is that it sounds kind of dated, and also sounds like you are copying Eddie. But, it does sound fast. Figure out ways to make it your own so that you can create your own voice.

Work on Something You Love

Nothing will drive you to work harder, then to work on something you care about. I’ve tried learning songs that I hate, and there is nothing worse than doing that. Learning a hard song that you love will be less a chore than an easy song that you hate.

In the end music is about what moves you (and hopefully your audience). Speed is something that can be learned with lots of practice. There are some short cuts, but the real driver is practice. The nice thing about the times we live in is that you can find examples of how things are done with just a few key strokes. Which is also a detriment, will the next generation of guitarists all sound the same. I doubt it, because there is always someone who wants to push the envelope.

Don’t be afraid to ask me a question. The worst that can happen is that I’ll ignore it.