How to play faster

As a guitar player who’s into heavy metal I’ve practiced playing fast quite a lot. I don’t think it’s at all necessary to be able to play incredibly fast to be a good player, but it can definitely be fun to do and it’s a great addition to your playing.

So here are some tips I have for how to practice speed playing.

• Practice slowly
• Check your speed
• Practice consistently
• Play at 80% speed
• Relax your muscles
• The more you do it the better you get

Practice slowly

The first step to playing quickly is to practice slowly. This one might seem obvious, but I mean practice REALLY slowly. Practice so slowly that you get bored while playing. Practice so slowly you almost fall asleep. Practice whatever fast passages you’re trying to play at around 30bpm or so. Play it so slowly that every single tiny note is perfect. The goal is to slow it down a ton so that you can think about each small part of your playing. You want to think about your wrist position, your finger position, your hand position, and any other aspects of your technique.

I’ve got a YouTube video on this specific topic that I recommend you check out to get some more in depth ideas on how to implement this into your practice time.

Adam Neely also has a video where he discusses this same idea. It’s something that professional golfers and Olympic athletes will do.

The reason for doing this is because when you’re playing quickly any extraneous movement becomes more of a hurdle to playing accurately. Your movements need to be more efficient in order to play more quickly. If you can imagine playing jumps on piano, stride piano style, when playing slowly efficiency doesn’t matter as much because you have time to add in extra movement. When you’re playing quickly it’ll become much harder to play with extraneous movements because you don’t have as much time to do it. So minimizing extra movements helps you play faster because you literally are doing less movement.

I list this one first because this practice technique has been the most useful for me. I often take things and play them incredibly slowly repeatedly for only a few minutes and then I’m able to play them. In the moment it’s not the most exciting thing to do, but if you can handle doing it for a few minutes, even ten minutes, you’ll be much better at playing the passage.

Check your speed

The next thing to do, after playing incredibly slowly, is to check your speed.

Test your speed playing. Do it both without and with a metronome. Check just how fast you can play it accurately. Only play it a few times because you want to just check how fast you can play.

I like to check my speed once for every ten times I play it slowly. That way the majority of the times I’m playing it cleanly and accurately.

You can check at the full tempo or check at a faster tempo that is still accurate.

Playing it too fast for too long will ingrain bad habits, poor technique, and sloppy playing. We want to ingrain good habits, proper technique, and clean playing. So check your speed sparingly.

Practice consistently

One of the best things you can do to improve your speed is to practice consistently. Practicing every day would be ideal, but if that isn’t possible then figure out some other regular schedule to practice regularly and consistently.

It will take time, and you may not be able to increase the speed at which you’re playing every single day. Progress might not be perfectly linear. The goal is to have progress that trends towards playing more quickly. Look at your average playing speed over a few days or even a few weeks. That way you’ll be able to better tell whether you’re improving or not.

This can be frustrating because we always want to see immediate progress and immediate results, but as long as you’re seeing progress over the course of a few weeks you’re still seeing progress.

Play at 80% speed

Another way to practice speed playing is to play at 80% speed. This is a technique I learned from the guitar player Joe Stump while I was taking lessons with him at Berklee College of Music.

Play at 80% speed. 100% speed is the maximum speed you could play the passage fairly cleanly. 80% of that speed is significantly slower and should be much easier to play cleanly and accurately while still being a fairly fast speed.

The way Joe Stump taught me this technique was that you set your metronome at 80% speed and play repeatedly and continuously. Think of this almost like an endurance exercise. You’re playing fairly quickly and for a long period time. Longer than the full passage. You’ll have to loop the passage to achieve this goal. You want to be playing continuously for a few minutes.

Eventually after doing this, even for just five minutes, you should notice it becoming a little easier to play at that speed. The goal is to adjust to playing at that slightly higher speed so that it feels effortless. When that happens you check where your max speed would be and adjust where 80% is.

Relax your muscles

This one can be a little difficult if you normally have tension in your shoulders and arms, but relaxing your muscles can greatly improve your playing. It’ll make it easier to move all of your fingers and help with playing accurately.

One way that’s useful to do this while practicing is to tense up every muscle in your body, and then relax those muscles. Doing this a few times can help highlight where you’re holding tension and help you lessen that tension a little bit.

As you try to play faster and faster notice any tension that comes up as you increase the speed. Often people will play faster and with more tension because they’re not comfortable enough at that speed to play with relaxed muscles. So as you increase the speed pay attention to any tension in your body as you increase speed and take steps to lessen that tension.

Another thing that can help with lessening tension is stretching. Sometimes when playing quickly for a long period of time you may notice your hand or arm muscles cramping up. Shake out those limbs and then stretch them lightly. Static stretches can help and so do dynamic stretches like rolling your wrists.

The more you do it the better you get

This may also be obvious, but the faster you are able to play the more easily you’ll be able to learn fast music. If you practice one specific scalar run and get that up to 16th notes at 120bpm, you’ll also be able to more easily learn another scalar passage and play it at 120bpm. It might not be immediately after learning it, but the process of increasing your playing speed for the new passage will be faster than for the original passage.

Basically, the more you do it the easier it gets to do. Once you’ve got the finger mobility and finger speed learning fast passages becomes easier, even if they are slightly different than the one that you originally practiced and learned.

That’s it for my tips on how to increase your playing speed. I hope that was useful. As with all of this stuff, try out different practice techniques and practice methods and see what works for you. Some of these may help you more than others so test them out first and use whichever ones work.

ISJ