Improving your guitar technique

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Every learner guitar player is impressed by virtuoso guitar technique. It is an automatic reaction to watching an exhibition of outstanding technique. Before we look at ways of improving speed in guitar playing, just think about guitarists that you have seen playing fast. Do you really want to do that? Is that your idea of music?

Steve Vai, John Mclaughlin and Joe Satriani are guitar virtuosos but if you do not see yourself creating music in their styles then there is not much point in learning to play like them. Fast guitar playing expresses only one kind of feeling and a beginner needs to look at ways to express a whole range of emotions. Now, if you concentrate, with any degree of success on learning to play the guitar at top speed you will find yourself playing fast habitually.

Here is a YouTube video of a group of virtuoso guitarists who have given concerts together on and off, for about thirty years:

This group’s guitar playing is world class but after touring for a while they hve told the press that after a while they had trouble playing slowly. This level of guitar virtuosity may be something to aim for but remember there are many guitarists who have never aimed at being technical virtuosos but are still expressive musicians.

Do not worry too much about speed right at the beginning. You need to learn chords, pick songs learn how to read tabs, lots of stuff. Get comfortable with yourself as a guitar player before starting on the path as a virtuoso.

The great musicians of the world have talked about how they spent all day with their instrument at some time in their lives. Usually sometime in their teen years they were in their rooms for ten hours a day playing the guitar. Large amounts of time devoted to practice are essential to exceptional guitar playing.

One reason that you need to spend alot of time practicing is that there is so much more work to be done than just working on technique. The other reason is that your technique improves much faster if you are taking your body beyond a certain level of fatigue. Let us say you want to practice your picking. Grab a list of exercises from the web like these licks.

Do not try to learn them by heart but print them out or have them on your computer screen where you can see them. Now is the time to remember why you are sitting here doing this. It is not to start playing fast today or this week but to begin a routine of practice that allows your body to aquire fast guitar technique at its own pace. The key to this is to play strictly at your body’s capacity at the present moment. So if you are just starting your practice, you will be playing slowly, in ten minutes’ time you will be playing a little faster with comfort, in another ten minutes you will be playing even more smoothly but you will be trying to force your body to play fast. You will be in the guitar playing zone now so why not take advantage of it? Because you are here to practice slowly, that is why. So check that your muscles are relaxed and begin playing slowly again.

All this time your are working through a list of say, ten licks or scale exercises. Start at the first one and work through to the last one, then begin again. After a few times you will be ready to stop and do something else. But stopping is not how you learn to play the guitar. You need to practice playing slowly and checking to see that your muscles are relaxed until this way of practicing is in your blood. If you can get to the stage where you can practice in this way without too much discomfort, you will also be seeing an increase in your speed.

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