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.
(i hope this helps) :p
