We all know there’s so much more to guitar than playing fast, yet building speed is an important technical marker for musicians. After all, a good deal of music is relatively (or extremely) fast paced, so we may as well be equal to the challenge. 

Once we accept that we wouldn’t mind developing our chops, what’s the best way to go about it? Beyond lots of time and dedication, that is. 

Below you’ll find 10 guitar speed tips I think every player should know. Enjoy! 

Our first and best speed tip is to practice slowly. The idea is that slow playing allows us to fast-track a perfect rendition of a piece, enabling proper muscle memory to develop from the start. 

The hilarious Youtubers on TwoSetViolin often make fun of the endlessly-repeated practice tip, “If you can play it slowly, you can play it quickly.” Do they mean slow practice is overrated, or that speed requires more than slowing down alone? 

We answer “no” and “yes,” respectively, to the questions above. Slow practice is unquestionably the basis for speed, but it won’t guarantee speed without 1) accurate playing, 2) adequate technique, and 2) sufficient repetitions. 

Thus, TwoSetViolin is right to poke fun at such a classical cliche, but I don’t believe they would steer anyone away from diligent and painstaking slow practice. 

Over the course of this post, we’ll cover each of the above prerequisites for fast playing, but remember, always, that slow playing is the golden rule for all guitar progress. I encourage you to play slowly for at least the majority of your practice time. 

We’ll conclude with an interesting question: would we go wrong practicing slowly 90-99% of  our practice time—if we had the discipline to do so, that is? 

I do feel pretty sure that always practicing slowly would be a mistake, since some speed work (technical, mock-performance, etc.) seems essential, but I don’t think the “radical commitment” percentage range I suggested above would be a liability. In fact, I encourage you to give it a shot and let me know how it affects your progress! My guess is that it would provide an enormous boost. 

Slow practice is listed before accuracy only because the former tends to lead to the latter. After all, fast playing is nothing without accuracy—we’re impressed not by speed alone but speed paired with control. Lose that control, even for a second or two, and your performance could fall apart. 

That means speed practice will nearly always be accuracy practice. It’s almost a paradox: the moment you learn to ignore speed and focus entirely on hitting your marks is the moment you hit your speed breakthrough. 

What exactly do we mean by accuracy? I think we mean a few things at once. 

First and foremost, we mean musical accuracy. How well can we match, in our physical playing, our target sound-picture? We strive to honor the music itself, every note and every rest. 

Next, we mean accuracy of the fretting hand—finger placement, clear tone, minimal pressure. Also, accuracy of the playing hand, the details of which will depend on whether you use your fingers or a pick, but the principles are energy conservation and sophistication of tone. 

But accurate practice extends beyond the hands alone. We can talk about precise movements of the larger joints and muscles—the elbows, arms, and shoulders, about posture as a whole. 

Last but not least, however, we need to consider accurate mental states. These are mindsets optimized, emotionally and intellectually, to maximize musical attention and progress. 

For instance, if we’re constantly thinking about food while we practice, our playing will suffer. Similarly, if the narrative, “I’m an awful player; I should just give up,” is running through our minds as we drill, we’re also compromising our potential. 

Our guitar technique determines, in many ways, our musical freedom. If our technique is only capable of playing single lines, we’ll be incapable of two-voice counterpoint. If our technique is limited to simple chord shapes, we’ll be restricted to basic accompaniment, and so forth. 

Clearly, we’d like our technique to allow us to play a broad range of music—our favorite tunes, at the very least, but also pieces we may fall in love with down the line. We’d also like to avoid injury and feel (and perhaps look) good while we’re playing. 

I recommend you dedicate time every day for technical work. This includes scales, arpeggios, chord changes, and more. Basically, every motor skill your music requires is something you should be drilling regularly. 

If you’re a beginner, or you feel that your guitar-playing mechanism is rarely sufficient for songs you’re learning, it’s time to put extra time into technique. Remember that it’s not so much a matter of “natural talent” here. Rather, it’s all about consistent hard work. Speed work is a grind, but definitely worth it.  

If you’re looking for help improving your fingerstyle technique quickly, be sure to check out my new ebook, Fingerstyle Fitness! It offers you 10 simple drills (5 for the right hand, 5 for the left) that cover the core elements of fingerstyle technique. I don’t believe there’s anything like it, and I would have loved to have it as a beginner-intermediate player. 

Speaking of hard work, let’s talk about repetition. In French, the term for practice, “la répétition,” literally means repetition. There’s simply no question that fast playing is the result of many, many repeated playings. 

I don’t have a lot to add here, as the concept is fairly self-explanatory. Obviously we’re talking about perfect repetitions (or as close to perfect as possible). Also note that you’ll probably need more redundancy than you expect, especially if you’re really looking to play quickly. 

Knowing that repetition and patience are essential to playing guitar quickly, you may start to look at virtuosic performances differently. If you often look at such musical feats as discouraging in any way, remember that the players you see have often been playing those pieces for weeks, months, years, or even decades. In any case, no one gets there right away! 

Ghost playing is noiseless and nearly effortless. The idea is to reduce your sound output so as to maximize the energy you can put toward your muscle memory. 

The important thing is not to be totally quiet, but rather to reallocate your physical resources. We noted above that countless repetitions are essential for fast guitar playing, which means making each repetition use the least amount of energy is a reasonable strategy. 

That said, you do also need to incorporate full volume practice. I suggest you spice up your practice by occasionally increasing your attack, possibly even beyond performance-level necessity. Always be aware of how loud you’re playing, as this builds your musical sensitivity. 

Visualization is the act of imagining yourself playing through a piece without actually doing it. You don’t need your guitar for this; you just need a receptive mind. 

Few guitar players visualize regularly, so don’t be intimidated if this practice seems foreign to you. Look into visualization or mental practice, however, and you’ll find that a surprising number of professionals (across many disciplines) make good use of it. 

How do we get started then? First off, note that visualization to increase guitar speed is a small part of what, in general, visualization can bring to your guitar routine. You can use it for sight-reading, repertoire work, narrative shaping, mock performances, and more. (Check out my dedicated post on mental practice for more detail). 

In our case, we’ll use visualization to mentally “run through” any repertoire piece, scale, or exercise we’re working on. Doing this mentally rather than physically provides a number of benefits: you save yourself energy, decrease the risk of injury, allow yourself to do more speed work than normal, and build crucial neural connections (you can’t play it fast until you can think through it fast). 

We can incorporate visualization in a few different ways. I’ll list a few examples below: 

1) With a score in hand and a recording (at the desired tempo) playing

2) With a score in hand and imagining the feeling/sound of playing

3) No score in hand but listening to a recording, mentally playing along

4) No score in hand, everything happening mentally
 

Clearly, we’ll start at 1 or 2 as beginners, and then progress to 3 and 4. But regardless of that, I can assure you that all the options above are not only helpful supplements to normal practice, but could replace much of it. In fact, done properly, I’m convinced that mental work is often superior to physical practice. 

I’ve personally had a lot of experience with mental guitar work, and it’s definitely the most powerful tool I have at my disposal to improve quickly. Use it to build speed, sure, but that’s the least of what’s possible with a strong mental game. 

The most exciting way to play guitar faster is…well…to play guitar faster. You may think this is the worst thing to be doing, as premature fast playing sacrifices accuracy.

However, the key is to use speed bursts, rather than play fast all the time, as too many of us do. Simply let your plucking/picking hand “sprint” for a minute or two before returning to a careful walk. 

A successful guitar speed routine of slow-fast-slow is sort of like a training sandwich.

The classic—and perhaps still the best—way to play guitar faster is to use a metronome and move up notch by notch. This may be the most common technique among professional musicians to bring a piece up to tempo. 

I think this is a safe and reliable method to build your guitar speed. Just be wary of a few things: for one, be sure you only tick up the metronome once you’re truly ready. One or two solid repetitions is not enough. Christopher Parkening, for instance, would only feel ready after seven perfect run-throughs. 

The other key point here is to start so slow on the metronome that you really can play the given passage perfectly. If you can’t find such a speed, consider isolating the hardest parts for a while or, worst case, choose an easier piece.

In chemistry, the rate-limiting step, or the slowest step in a reaction mechanism, will largely determine an entire reaction rate. We can think of a similar concept as guitarists, since every piece or passage has a certain speed-limiting element. 

This limiting element could be an awkward chord change, a fast shift, or what have you, but sometimes it’s simply one hand or the other. 

After all, our hands have very different jobs as guitarists. One frets (most of the time), while the other picks or plucks (most of the time). If you feel like your guitar speed is ever blocked, try to figure out if the problem is in a certain hand. If so, which one? 

I find that guitarists don’t do nearly enough in the way of hand isolation work, though it’s very common among pianists. Chord changes are often best tackled with the left hand alone, while strumming or fast picking is a right-hand issue. 

Basically, don’t be afraid to build up your hands independently before bringing them together. Go back and forth as needed to boost your progress. 

Fast guitar playing requires finely-coordinated hand and arm muscles. We need our fingers to be flexible, highly responsive, and strong. The only way to ensure this is to practice all the time, right? Especially technical work? 

Until recently, my answer would have been yes to the above. But that was before I found the ingenious book, Finger Fitness, which is all about working out your fingers, much like a professional athlete works out their body. 

I encourage you to check out the book above (or these helpful videos), which demonstrate finger exercises designed especially for musicians. Greg Irwin, the man who created the finger fitness regimen, has such incredible finger dexterity that he actually performs finger ballet as a kind of stage routine. 

I’m a big believer in applying an athletic training approach to the fingers. Luckily, you can find all this awesome finger fitness content online for free by following the links above. Be sure to check it out and let me know how it affects your guitar playing! 

We’ve considered a number of ways to increase our guitar speed above, and frankly I’m an advocate for all of them. I’m also an advocate for using everything at your disposal—if you suspect that doing X or Y may accelerate your progress, please give it a shot and then tell me about it in the comments. 

Always remember that technical skills, including the ability to play guitar fast, are best used as a means to make beautiful music, having little value in and of themselves. Also, if you can’t play fast, that doesn’t mean you’re not a great musician! 

Thanks for reading.