Category: Guitar Techniques

If you want to play guitar fast Shredaholic is a site dedicated to the love of shred and virtuoso guitar playing. The site includes free guitar lessons to help shred / metal guitarists in training, but is also a useful resource for any guitar player wanting to improve or learn a style of a particular guitarist.
This page has a bunch of lessons on mouthwatering topics like:

Two Hand Tapping

How To Play Faster - Without Having To Practice!

Beginner’s Guide To Shredding

The Most Important Skill That Most players Don’t Have

Can YOU Really Become a Great Guitar Player?

The Secret of Speed (incredible lightness)

How To Practice Guitar Chord Changes

Easy Bar Chords

Technorati Tags: play guitar fast, free guitar lessons, Two Hand Tapping, How To Play Faster, Guitar Chord Changes, Easy Bar Chords

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Everything2 is a collection of user-submitted writings. Below is part of an essay on muscle memory which should be useful to any guitar student.
“I was playing guitar, and just reached the end of a tune, when I was distracted. I noticed I’d played a couple of notes after the end of the tune. I remembered that I’d often previously played another tune after this one, but realised I had totally forgotten the other tune - I had no idea how to play it, and I couldn’t even remember what the melody sounded like. Over the next two hours, through a tedious but strangely amusing process of repeatedly playing over what I could remember, starting with those two notes, and many (mostly useless) attempts at self-distraction, I reconstructed the entire tune.
Indeed, learning a tune is for me a process of repeatedly playing it until I don’t have to think at all about what note comes next. I (slowly) decrypt, rather than read sheet music or tablature, and so those aren’t useful memory aids for me when I want to play a piece. I just have to play it over and over until it’s safely stored in my muscle memory.
Other examples: touch typing without being able to name the positions of keys on a keyboard; knowing how to say ‘d’, ‘t’ and ‘th’ without being able to say how the movement of your toungue differs between them. In these cases, you can imagine arriving at the answer by mentally rehearsing the movements involved, though I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have helped me with my tune.”
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Muscle%20memory

Technorati Tags: muscle memory

I found a great essay on learning to play guitar fast. Of course everybody says speed is not the point to guitar playing but we all like to show off!

“Before we dive into the realm of developing speed, let’s dispel a few misconceptions about it. Firstly, speed in and of itself is irrelevant. However, speed used within the context of a good piece of music and with taste is a good thing. The second misconception of speed is one I covered in the article The Art of Practice. Most people believe that in order to play fast you must practice fast. While you will eventually need to practice fast in order to play fast you need to develop some basic techniques in order to get the tools in order to start working up to your goal. It’s these techniques that need to be developed SLOWLY.
You need to be able to think while you play. Aaron Shearer, a famous classical guitar pedagogue was an advocate of “aim directed movement”, which is having a clear understanding of where the fingers need to go before you move them there. Aim directed movement can only be accomplished by slow practice.
The key to fast scales? The key is not only to practice flexing the finger (what the finger actually does to pluck the string) but practice extending the finger as well. From the time we were born our hands have grabbed things, and we have held on to them tight, thus, developing the flexors. It is our lack of strength in the extensors that need the catching up. One of the best ways to develop this is to practice Rasgueados ( Raas-Gee-ah-doe).
The rest of the article is at Guitar Noise and it’s called How can I learn to play really fast? By Logan L. Gabriel