My Online Guitar Lessons

Shredding is something a lot of guitarists want to learn. They seem drawn to the lightning fast speed of professional guitarists, and just dream of the day they can play that fast. However, they don’t take the necessary steps and do the work required to get there.

While playing insanely fast isn’t musicianship, playing faster is something everyone wants to learn. Increasing your playing speed on the guitar is a lot like working out. If you went to a gym, you wouldn’t be able to just bench press 300 lbs right away. The other people you see there that are much larger than you have worked long and hard, slowly increasing each day to be able to lift the weight they do. They all had to start somewhere to get where they are, and guaranteed they didn’t start at 300 lbs. They started lighter, slowly adding on weight.

Many people think that all they need to do is move their fingers faster. Well in some way that’s true, but what if a personal trainer said to you “all you need to do is push harder and you should be able to move 300 lbs” on the first day of working out. Your muscles in your finger are just like any other muscles. While, for example, your legs get daily use as you walk around, if you want them to get stronger, you need to push them harder doing various exercises depending on the results you want to achieve. Your fingers are no different. While they may be exercised with regular guitar playing, certain exercises are needed if you want to see drastic improvements.

There are many exercises you can do to increase your playing speed, the main one being scales. Before I show you a few exercises there are 4 steps that must be understood. When doing your exercises, these are your priorities, do not go onto the next until you have mastered the one before it:

1) Accuracy – This is number one because it is often the first thing sacrificed for speed. Every individual note must be perfectly clear. Don’t wuss out either. Since you’re going to make mistakes, make them loud so you can hear exactly what they are. Don’t play soft and quiet or put only a little bit of effort into it. For more accurate playing, try playing on the very tips of your fingers, curling your fingers so they hit the fret straight on.

2) Smoothness – Smoothness is getting rid of the ‘pause’ or ‘gap’ between each note played. Each note should be successive and strung together in a clean run. This comes after accuracy because if each note is accurate, it is easier to have a clean sounding run.

3) Aggression – Aggression is where you over exaggerate and emphasize each fretted and picked note. It’s where you put your heart and soul into each note and really give it your all. However, this comes after accuracy and smoothness, because you don’t want to be aggressively sloppy and full of mistakes.

4) Speed – Notice how this is the final step in playing faster. This is because if you do all the previous steps correctly over and over and over again, the speed will come. If you have got all the steps down before this one at a comfortable speed, slowly increase the beats per minute on your metronome and redo the whole process.

When I would workout at the gym, I had a journal where I recorded every exercise and weight to measure and track my progress. To do this in your guitar playing, use a metronome to keep track on how you are doing in your exercises by bpm (beats per minute). The metronome should be a guitarist’s best friend. Many guitarists feel that the metronome is unnecessary. I felt this way myself until I decided I wanted to improve my playing speed. It really is the best way to measure if your playing speed is improving. It is also the best way to improve your timing and song learning ability. If you don’t want to go out and buy one, there is a free one online here. There will be downloadable pdfs and guitar pro files available on the downloads page with a few exercises that I use for warming up and finger strengthening. With all these exercises, start at a slow pace ie. 60 bpm, playing two notes every beat.