Breaking the Speed Barrier: Going Fast on the Guitar
Everyone wants to go fast on the guitar, and for good reason. If you can play fast, it means you really know the guitar. In general, the ability to play fast means you’re more free to do what you want. Also, sometimes you just want to go fast. When you can, it’s freaking awesome.
How fast you can go is really a measure of how well you know the guitar. Speed is a byproduct of having a rock solid mental map of the guitar, and well-coordinated hands.
The way to build that map is a powerful combination of short sequences, and a metronome technique I call gear shifting.
The way to build well-coordinated hands, is lots of repetition doing things on the beat at different speeds. That click provides the guide to syncing up the hands.
What are sequences?
A sequence, for the purpose of this lesson, is four groups of four notes. It’s important that the sequence is short for several reasons.
- We can hold a short sequence in our short-term memory
- It keeps the time requirement of this exercise reasonable
- Short sequences are more likely to get used while soloing
- We can dramatically speed up a short sequence quickly
There’s also reasons for doing things in fours.
- Four is the most common grouping in popular music. Four chord songs, Four bar sections, Four beats per measure.
- It’s really easy to cut four in half twice for gear shifting.
The most important map we want to build in our mind is the CAGED pattern. So we pick a part of it, and make a sequence. Let’s choose columns C and A of the pattern, and place it in the key of D.
Our example sequence might be like this:
||---------|---------|---------|---------||
||---------|---------|---------|-------2-||
||---------|-------2-|-----2-4-|---2-4---||
||---2-4-5-|-2-4-5---|-4-5-----|-5-------||
||-5-------|---------|---------|---------||
||---------|---------|---------|---------||
Gear Shifting
“Gear shifting” is a metronome technique where we start playing a sequence at rate of 1 note per beat of the metronome gradually increasing from speed from 60 to 120 beats per minute (BPM). When reach 120 BPM, we “shift” back down to 60, this time playing 2 notes/beat. Again, gradually increase speed from 60 to 120 BPM, and shift down to 60, this time playing 4 notes/beat. Gradually increase the speed as high as possible.
The difference in speed from 1 note/beat at 60 BPM, to 4 notes/beat at 120 BPM is a factor of 8. We’re going 8 times faster than we we started! That means taking a sequence that took 16 seconds to play, and ending by playing through it in 2 seconds.
Step-by-Step, here’s how to do it:
Step 1. Set your metronome at 40 BPM, and play the sequence.
Starting extra slow is possibly the most important part of the process. Slow speed helps the brain begin to insulate the neural firings needed to play the sequence from everything else. The process is called myelination. It feels like giving our mind extra time to make decisions: “Okay, this finger here… NOW.. this finger here… NOW”, over and over. We are programming the brain and fitting the sequence into the grid of a clear rhythm. Without precise rhythm, we can’t go fast.
Step 2. The first time you can play sequence at very slow speed without a mistake, turn up the metronome 10 BPM, and play through it this faster speed. With every successful repetition, increase the speed until you reach 120 BPM.
Step 3. Here’s our first “gear shift”. At 120BPM, turn the metronome back down to 60 BPM. Play the sequence again, this time playing 2 notes per beat.
Step 4. Continue raising the speed 10 BPM after every successful repetition until you reach 120 BPM.
Personally, I find that somewhere around 80 or 90 BPM, the sequence starts getting handed over from my conscious to unconscious mind. That is, it’s going so fast that I’m no longer directly in control, I’ve either learned the sequence or I haven’t. Learning the sequence is done, now it becomes as a physical exercise.
Step 5. When you hit 120 BPM, shift down to 60 BPM again. A play 4 notes per beat.
Step 6. Escalating the speed 5 BPM after every successful repetition. 10 BPM is a bit aggressive. Besides, it only takes a couple seconds to do a repetition at this speed. Increase to the limit of your ability.
For me, I find 70 to 90 BPM is the range where it really has to clean up.
If your problem is here, it’s not the sequence, it’s an imbalance in your hands, which can be addressed by checking a few things.
I call 100BPM the “speed barrier”. It’s like making the transition from walking to running. Beyond this barrier is speed playing, and it’s where shredders and metal heads play. Making that “walking to running” transition is the hard part.
Around 120 BPM and 4 notes per beat, you should be enjoying a nice blur of notes. Personally, my need for speed doesn’t get much beyond about 120 or 130 BPM. Push it as high as you need to go for your playing.
Technique
What I’ve aimed to do here is illustrate a reliable, reproducible way to go from a crawl to a sprint with whatever sequence you’re aiming to brush up.
Using this technique, you’ll quickly develop an intuition for speeding up riffs from songs and planning other sequences as well, depending on what you need.
In my experience, this process can be used to take even a completely unfamiliar combination of notes up to blazing speed in about 20 minutes. This is assuming that you don’t have larger technical issues holding you back.
In the right hand, with my particular brand of technique, the wrist gets pretty rigid, and control of pick strokes moves up to the elbow. On an upstroke, it feels like the pick just touches the string and then bounces up away from the guitar to avoid plucking the next lower string. Down strokes feels similar, but easier, because gravity is helps the hand fall into the string. Increasing speed comes with smaller, more precise movements. It takes time to develop.
In my left hand, my middle and ring fingers stay very perpendicular to the fretboard, and my knuckles stay generally parallel to the bottom of the fretboard. My index and pinky fingers lean away from the middle two fingers. This seems to be the only way that the fretting hand doesn’t get tired or make the tendons that are connected to my fingers ache.
The metronome is very important. It aids visualization while learning the sequence at slow speeds, and at full speed, it gives us a clear criteria for giving ourselves feedback about whether we can or can’t play it.
Poor posture of the spine is a common stressor inhibiting speed. If this is you, try going classical – guitar on left leg, guitar all the way up to bottom of your chest. Focus on keeping your back straight, and picking over the center of your body.
Check for imbalance of the left hand. All the fingers might be ”leaning” to one side as opposed to coming straight down. The middle and ringer finger must be perpendicular to fret board. The index and pinky fingers lean away from each other. The thumb should stay straight and press flatly on the middle of the neck, somewhere between the index and ring finger, wherever it needs to be in order to help balance the hand. This stops muscular tension from creeping up the arm all the way into the shoulder and back.
