Play Guitar Faster

Welcome back everybody! Today we’re going to look at the question I’m asked more often than any other – how to play guitar faster!

What are the secrets to play guitar faster?

You’re here for the secrets to play guitar faster? If there was a magic pill for playing guitar faster, or more importantly playing guitar better, I guess I could probably sell it for a fortune! Sadly that magic pill does not exist. But guess what? I used to play guitar slow, in fact I used to not play guitar at all, and now I can play fast… really fast. What follows are the steps I took to get there, and you can do it too!

Play Guitar Faster – The Video Guide

This lesson is comprehensive (long!), which it needs to be so I can explain what we’re doing here beter than all the other guides you’ve seen. That is what make this the best guide to playing guitar faster. But I also know how quickly guitar players get bored, so if you want to get right to it, check out the video here. TABs for all the faster picking lessons and guitar speed exercises are further down the page.

And please do come back and read this stuff, it’s taken me ages to write… and it really works :).

The best gear for playing guitar fast

Now this is a little contentious, because you’ll always be able to find a super-fast guitar player who doesn’t conform to the rules I am about to set out, but you can definitely make your life easier for fast guitar playing with the following gear advice:

• Select a guitar with a thinner neck. Doing so will put less stress on your fretting hand.
• Have your guitar adjusted for a low action – a smaller distance between strings and fretboard means you can sound notes quicker. Sure, it’s a fraction… but all those fractions add up in the quest for super speed guitar playing!
• Use a thicker pick – the thicker the pick, the less it will flex while passing strings. You might also consider a pick with a pointed tip for minimum friction.

Ultimately though, you can make most things work with time and practice. If you love your guitar with a neck like a baseball bat, or your paper-thin pick…. awesome, go with them. It will likely be harder going, but you’ll get there eventually. Make sure as well you follow the principles on good posture, as well as the most efficient way to hold a guitar and a pick. If you need a refresher, check out this guide on the best way to hold a guitar.

How to play guitar FAST

OK here it comes. The secret all those salesy websites say they’ll give you for just 12 monthly payments of $99.99. And like a fool I’m going to tell you how to play guitar fast for free! And here it is….. practice!

Whoa there – don’t click away just yet! Anyone who says anything else is lying to you. There are no magic strings, magic picks or shortcuts to playing fast. You have to play a lot and gradually your fingers get the idea, making it easy for you to play faster. The good news? I can help you short-circuit the endless hours it can take to master fast alternate picking with some exercises designed to maximise efficiency and deliver maximum gains as quickly as possible.

Play Guitar Faster in just 10 Minutes a Day!

I guarantee that the guitar speed exercises I will show you can be completed in less than 10 minutes, and if you add them in to your practice routine every day you’ll be playing guitar faster in days, with massive improvements in less than a month! Improvements in both picking and fretting hand technique, speed, accuracy and dexterity can be yours in just 10 minutes a day!

Some of these are pretty hardcore though, so I’ll say again – if you feel any pain at all when playing… relax, take a break or have a rest day. It is not supposed to hurt, no matter what others tell you. Like any other physical exercise, you may feel tired, you might feel a slight tension in your hands and arms – but remember, cometh the day you’ve turned into Paul Gilbert, you’re going to want to be able to play using fast alternate picking song after song, not just one 20 second burst before putting your arm in a bucket of ice!

Start Slow and Build Up

The objective here is to get your fingers moving faster – so play at whatever pace you can accurately fret all the notes as directed. Make sure to keep your hands and shoulders relaxed. –If you experience any pain in your hands, slow down! If you find you’re getting a scruffy result, slow down. You want to teach your hands to move accurately as well as fast – if you play fast but messy in practice, guess what it will sound like when you try to play fast? Yep – fast and messy, with emphasis on the messy.

There is an exception though – if you want to play faster, you need to actually play faster (duh!). So the only time I’ll support you in playing the exercises less than perfectly is when you’re at the frayed edge of your ability. Push beyond the speed you can comfortably play, just for a few seconds before dropping back within your usual range. Then do it again, and drop back, then again… and drop back. Over the course of many sessions you will find the speed you feel comfortable at is gradually increasing!

Exercises to Play Guitar Faster

The guitar speed exercises below can be played ‘straight’ with a fixed number of notes over a bar (and ideally with a metronome), or ‘free time’ where the timing is manipulated so as to leave a different number of notes over each bar – or the lazy way as it is often known. If you can make it work, let the haters hate.

The notation below shows you where to put your fingers for each of the exercises – a couple of bars for each, after which you would continue across strings and up or down the neck as you saw fit. These are the same exercises I used to learn how to play fast, and they are also the exercises I use to keep my chops at a good standard.

To push the speed it is a good idea to play at the top end of your ability, but be sure to push beyond it for short periods. Being scruffy there is fine, it helps push your horizons!

I have said several times, but will again for legal reasons (!) – these exercises are physically demanding when you start, so start slow and be sure to stop if you experience anything beyond very mild and very temporary discomfort. It is not supposed to hurt, and you can do yourself serious harm if you go too far. No good being fast for 30 seconds and then having to take a few months off playing!

You have been warned! But there is also a very real risk of you developing blistering guitar speed, so with that… on to the exercises!

Guitar Speed Exercise 1: Tremolo Picking Exercise

Guitar Speed Exercise 2: First Alternate Picking Exercise

This type of alternate picking exercise is popularly known as a ‘spider pattern’, because your fingers crawl up and down the frets one at a time – I guess that’s how spiders play guitar! The basic idea is you start on a low string at a low fret with your index finger, then play one finger per fret across the four. Jump up a string and do it again, and again until you run out of strings, then once your pinky hits the high E slide up one fret and come back doen a fret at a time, then drop down the strings repeating the pattern until you run out of strings before sliding up a fret with your index finger and looping the pattern around again:

This pattern is a bit of a classic for building guitar playing speed but it has two serious limitations:

1. It builds very specific muscle memory sequences which are unlikely to be useful in musical situation.
2. It is atonal, making it limited in practical application.

It is, however, a great start for building alternate picking speed. The simplicity of the pattern also means you can switch your brain off and just blaze it in front of the TV for as long as your heart desires! And you will play faster with this exercise alone.

Guitar Speed Exercise 3: The best 4-fingers per string Exercise

This exercise builds on the previous spider pattern by skipping strings and forcing your hands into unfamiliar movements. By maintaining a strict down/up/down/up picking hand pattern throughout you will sometimes be crossing strings from inside, sometimes from outside. Repeat the pattern and keep going until you run out of neck:

This exercise is much more effective than simple spider patterns, since your fingers will move in many more combinations across strings, building much more useful technique for real musical situations. This is THE exercise for finger dexterity – practice it daily and you will find your ability to storm your familiar picking lines will amaze you!

Guitar Speed Exercise 4: Linear Scales Exercise

We now want to transition from playing fast to playing fast in a muscially useful way. No sense in being able to blaze chromatic lines but nothing else! You may remember this pattern from my recent warm up exercises lesson, specifically the legato warm up – using the A minor scale and working it up and down a single string. Well – this is the same concept, but alternate picking every note instead of using hammer-ons and pull-offs! 

Repeat this exercise across all strings for maximum effect. 

By moving the same pattern up or down the neck, and by playing it on other strings, you can re-use the same pattern in other keys as needed.

Guitar Speed Exercise 5: Modal Scale Runs Exercise

Continuing the theme of playing fast in a msucially relevant way, one of my favourite things to do is practice standard modal scale patterns as fast as possible. By doing this, you’re using the same patterns as you’ll be using in lead playing, so the muscle memory created is 100% relevant.

G major / E minor in this example: G Ionian (Major), A Dorian, B Phrygian, C Lydian, D Mixolydian, E Aeolian (Natural Minor), F# Locrian and back to G Major.

This is a great exercise for developing fast alternate picking, but it is also fantastic for cementing the modal scale shapes across the fretboard – the notes of this exercise are always those of G major, but the change in note order and emphasis give them a different focus, or tonal centre. This, in turn, changes the qualities of the notes when played against each other as the intervals change.

All that means that playing the same notes in different combinations, and over different chords, will have different and intersting musical results, but will always be in key – provided you’re playing in G major or E minor!

TAB Key

Hammer ons: h.
Pull offs: p.
Vibrato: ~.
Bends: b.
Release bend: br.
Tap: t.
Slides: sl.

And that, my friends, is how you begin to play guitar faster. Play often, play clean and push yourself to higher speeds in short bursts. At the risk of repeating myself… If it hurts – Take a Break! You can find more articles on scales and guitar technique to help you develop as a player here. If you’ve got any questions please get in touch on Facebook or Twitter.

If you start feeling your fingers seizing up, please take slow down. It is very easy to get carried away with this stuff once you start flying! And when you do start flying, stop back here and leave me a comment, maybe a link to you showing everyone what you can do!