Speed Practice
These are some basic things to help motivate you, to develop your speed and accuracy on guitar.
ESP LTD EC-1000 Duncan
Charvel Pro-Mod DK24
Fender American Vintage II 1963 Telecaster
Play Slow
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.
Practice Different Techniques
Some techniques sound faster or can help you learn to play fast. Sweep picking is a good example. It’s 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. You can find so may examples of sweep picking online. It works well as a warm up exercise, to help your coordination in your fretting hand. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to move your fingers faster, with very little effort.
Tapping is another technique that sounds real fast. It’s 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. Tapping is good to learn, and make it your own so that you can create your own voice.
Play Something You Love
Nothing will drive you to try harder, than working on something you enjoy. No one wants to play songs that they don’t like. It’s important to choose songs that will keep you interested. If the song is hard to play, you will still be more motivated to learn it, compared to a song you don’t like.
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. The more you practice, the better your playing will be. As you get better, your speed will follow.
