It is a
fact that the majority of lead guitarists want to increase the speed of
their playing. Having virtuoso playing ability is a wonderful way to add
a new tool to your arsenal as a musician. However this tool is also one
of the most difficult to attain. There have been many articles written
on the topic and the most common advice that is often heard is “practice
slowly and use a metronome.” Of course this is very good advice that
should definitely be followed. However, there are a great number of
struggling guitarists out there who use a metronome daily and practice a
lot, yet are still frustrated with their lack of progress. Some of them
decide that they don’t have talent to attain such high level of ability
and give up, while others continue in hopes that one day their work will
pay off. From my experience, I feel that there is one very common
misconception about practicing for speed development and I will do my
best to clear it up with this article.
The part where most people go wrong is in their THINKING. Most
guitarists assume that speed is something that can be attained DIRECTLY
as in: “I’m going to practice this lick for 20 minutes and try to play
it faster than I could before.” Even those players who practice slowly
and then try to increase their speed using a metronome find that a lot
of times this approach fails to bring the results that they are looking
for.
The root of the problem is in the fact that players focus all of their
energy on the end result (being able to play fast) and this is making
them miss everything they need to see in order to achieve it. I will
explain what I mean.
The problem is in the believing that speed comes directly as a result of
practicing. A much more effective way of thinking about it would be to
say that practicing should involve becoming familiar with the MOTIONS
required to play a certain phrase, and speed will naturally develop as a
result. Stop! Go back and re-read the last sentence several times and
THINK about it! After the motions become smooth and well ingrained in
the muscle memory, they become so easy to execute then you don’t even
have to think about playing fast, the fingers just “do it themselves”. A
lot of players struggle with speed because their movements are often
imprecise and full of tension. Tension is a body’s natural reaction to
something it is not familiar with. When I had a consultation on picking
technique with Ney Mello he told me that “simply trying to play fast is
pointless, because if you don’t know the motions, you are telling your
hands to speed up something that they have never even learned!”, You may
be wondering: what specifically should I be focusing on? You can start
by thinking about the left hand fingering, the picking pattern, the
motions of the right hand, and monitoring levels of tension throughout
the body. This very well may require you to practice even slower than
you probably ever have before with a metronome. After you work these
things out for the lick that you are having trouble with, THEN you can
pull out the metronome and pay attention to keeping your technique the
same as you did when you were working out the correct physical motions
of playing it.
I can see some students saying that using this approach would require
too much “unnecessary” focus and concentration on something as
“superficial” as technique. Well unfortunately, there is no way around
this. If you want to become a great player, you have to put forth a lot
of mental energy into mastering the instrument on a physical level.
Having great technique will enable you to express your musical ideas
exactly the way you hear them. So concentration and mental focus is a
price well worth paying to acquire this ability. Also this approach to
practicing should be utilized anytime you are having trouble playing
something and not only to improve speed.
After you feel like you really have a handle on the motions of playing a
lick at a super slow tempo you can pull out your metronome and begin a
slow work up through the tempos. If at any point you feel that you’ve
hit a plateau (you can’t move up past a certain BPM marking for
example), go back to the super slow practice without the metronome and
reinforce the correct movements into the muscle memory.
This is a VERY different mindset than simply trying over and over again
to push through the plateau in ability. The point is to get you to THINK
about what you are doing
What I learned from experience was that speed was really a byproduct of
accuracy and consistency in learning the motions. After you practice in
this way for awhile you will notice that the passage is becoming easier
to play and you are able to play it faster than before. Why did this
happen? Because the motions are now so well ingrained in your muscles
and also because you took the time to really pay attention to playing
accurately using the most efficient technique. Once again this a very
different mindset than sitting down and mindlessly playing the lick over
and over to the metronome. This approach may bring you limited results
in the beginning, but it will not bring you virtuoso levels of
technique.
So the main point that I want you to take away from this article is that
when you sit down to practice something to the metronome, make sure that
you think about what you are doing. Pay attention to the fingering and
picking that you use. Depending on the phrase you may want to use
slightly different motions with the right hand than you would for other
things. This is important to notice and it is important to practice
something slow in the same way that you are going to play it fast. This
is what I mean when I say that speed is a by product of accuracy and
consistency. This seems very obvious but a lot of players use different
techniques when the practice a lick at a slow speed and then try to play
it fast using different motions that their body hasn’t learned yet! No
wonder that the rate of progress has diminished.
So I hope that you understand now that speed should not be a direct goal
of your practice, it will develop by itself if you take the time to
learn the motions that you use when you play guitar. Remember: focusing
on speed as a primary objective will make you miss everything you need
to achieve it. Good luck with your practicing and playing!
