How To Play Guitar Fast!

Freaky fast guitar became popular in the eighties when a lot of guitar players wanted to play at speed like Satriani and Malmsteen. This need for speed never went away, and today guitarists like Vai still give shredders the taste of what they can do. But, you know it is not as easy as they make it look.

You can learn fundamentals that can help you develop the speed you want, and concentrating on each of these will pay-off in the long run. First of all, you want to work on your right-hand technique, your left-hand technique and recognize that practising to build up speed doesn’t happen over night. Its not possible to increase speed and fluency by developing just one aspect of your playing. Also, playing fast without accuracy just sounds plain awlful. Left hand proficiency takes time to build up. You need to develop excellent finger and thumb placement, and good finger dexterity and accuracy. The two basic thumb positions used by guitar players are over the top of the fretboard, and resting behind the fretboard. Behind the neck will give you greater reach on the fretboard and better control and consistency. If you practice guitar scales and exercises fast in this beginning thumb position, you will increase your speed in time.

Finger position on the fret board as you play is critical for speed. Your four fingers should hover above the first 4 frets until needed. Again, keeping fingers here will optimise speed when playing scales and exercises. Finger movement is more tricky. Players can either keep a finger down when used until you need to raise it (finger anchoring), or lift each finger as the next one comes down (finger movement). For speed, finger movement is best. Finger accuracy involves consistently fretting a note right behind its fret bar and not just anywhere within the fret. This will give accuracy. Also, always ply with finger tips and not sides. The more consistent you are, the faster and more accurate you will be.

Right hand technique is just as important as left hand. Your picking style, how you hold the pick and your motion will all affect speed. Picking can be alternating, sweeping or circular picking, and should probably be learnt in that order as they increase in difficulty as well as speed. Alternate picking can still be very fast, and is used by Malmsteen so don’t underestimate it!

How you hold the pick is a matter of taste, but for speed the pick needs to be almost perpendicular to the strings and only using the very tip of the pick to strike the string, in order to decrease resistance. The motion that you use is as important, and you want the motion to come entirely from the wrist for speed, although some people use wrist and elbow effectively. Always avoid using finger and thumb muscles.

All of this will take discipline and practise. You will have to make time everyday to get better, a big splurge at the beginning of the week then nothing for the rest of the week is no good. Remember to practise with a drum machine, start at slow speeds and then increase tempo gradually.

With these simple techniques, you can play guitar really fast in no time at all.