Originally Posted by: ren True story... speed is a by-product of solid technique

so shouldnt we be telling him what good technique is then apart from just tellinhim to improve it or practice. :o

anyway. few question how fast is your legato. and how fast is your tremelo pickin.

i ask this beacause there are three main causes to lack of speed. fretting hand speed, picking speed, and co=ordinating the two.

if your left hand(fretting) is fast but picking is slow concentrate on the picking hand. if your picking is fast and your fretting hand is slow practice hammerons and pull offs a lot. if they are both fast then you probably have good technique u just struggel to co-prdinate. this can only be fixed by starting slow and speeding up slowly.

now technique wise. there are two things that make you play faster, how quick you move and how far you have to move your hands to play a note. if u can move really really fast but u make huge motions with your hands and arms u will never play truely fast. so think which of these two you could improve.

moving quickly is mainly dependant on being relaxed, eg not tense. when your hand is tense it is because the muscles are oposing each other. take moving the elbow joint as an example of this. the bicep( muscle on top of the arm) pulls the wrist towards the sholder and the tricep (muscle on bottom of arm) extends the arm. if you are tense it means both muscles are pushing agaist each other. if the bicep aplies a force of say 2Newtons and the tricep 3 Newtons, the resultant force is only 1 Newton. therefore as force is = to mass x acceleration, your hand will accelerate slower, and therefore never get as fast and never be able to move its fastest. it is the same with picking or fretting on the guitar.

as you try and play progressively faster you will stiffen up. resist this urge. only play as fast as you can play without tensing.

another aspect of speed is how big an obect you are moving. the wrist weighs a lot less than the forarm and wrist put together. to move the wrist and forarm from ythe elbow requires a much larger force to get the same acceleration as the hand moved from the wrist. remember force = mass x acceleration. so if the force is fixed and the mass goes up the acceleration goes down.

the other factor is econimy of motion. you must move your arm/hands as little as possible.

for the picking hand this can be done in several distinct ways, first pick from the wrist all the motion should come from the wrist. this gives far more controll than picking from the elbow so you will make less unnecessary movement. using a thick pick will help two, as it bends less it will take a smaller motion to pick. i also sharpen my picks to a point. again this reduces the amount you have to move your hand to pick ( or just get a sharp pick).
(as an aside use the elbow joint to move your arm up and down the strings, eg the elbow decides what string you willl play and the wrist decides actually plays the string. the palm of the hand should touch all the strings above the one you are playing. this will strop them ringing out and feedbacking, giving you a cleaner sound which is important when you go faster.) you could choose to use econimy picking instead of alternate, but i find this brings timing issues and fast is no good if its out of time.

for the left hand try to not to lift your fingers to far off the fretboard as they will take longer to come back down again. and use all your fingers including the pincky if you dont. if all the fingers move then each has to move less far, increasing speed

so basically pick from the wrist. keep your hands/ wrists relaxed. use a sharp thick pick (eg 1 mm). use all your fingers. move both hands as little as possible.

otherwise just practice if the one hand is much slower than the other practice it by itself untill both hands are capable of fast speeds. then put it together to pick quickly, with a metronome starting slow getting faster.


edit; sorry read stuff to quickly didnt notice people gave technique advice. my bad