8 Tips for playing quickly

Learning to play quickly on an instrument takes some dedicated practice. And it can be especially frustrating if you aren’t sure how to improve your playing speed. I’ve had a number of teachers on different instruments who have given me many different practice techniques for playing quickly. I’ve compiled a list of them here.

Table of contents

A note on speed
1. Use a metronome
2. Play incredibly slowly
3. Practice at moderate speeds
4. Slowly increase the speed
5. Isolate sections or techniques
6. Play faster than you need to
7. Use efficient movements
8. Practice perfectly
Final notes

A note on speed

I believe that playing speed is a result of efficient and relaxed technique. The more efficient movements you’re able to use and the more relaxed you’re able to play, the easier it’ll be for you to increase the speed. But those are things that you need to get used to. Often players will tense up when they play faster. Practicing staying relaxed is a key to playing quickly

The guitarist Guthrie Govan has mentioned in lessons that with good technique the speed will come. I agree with that quite a lot. If you can play something relaxed and well, you’ll likely be able to play it quickly. The more you’re able to relax as you speed it up, the more easy it’ll be to play faster and faster.

Some parts to playing quickly are things that’ll naturally come from playing your instrument. Playing slowly will lead to playing quickly, as long as you’re using efficient movements and staying relaxed. Though I should make a note that those two things are not always easy to do.

With that out of the way let’s get into the first tip.

1. Use a metronome

This is my first tip. If you don’t practice with a metronome it’ll be incredibly hard to increase your playing speed because you won’t be playing the correct rhythms. Another option is to play along with recordings. The goal is to have a constant beat that you are playing with. This will help develop your own internal sense of rhythm.

It’ll also ensure that the fast passage you’re playing is the correct speed and rhythm. When playing quickly the goal isn’t simply to play a bunch of notes as fast as possible. The goal is to play a specific rhythm quickly. In order to ensure that we do that, we need to have something to measure with. Our measuring tool here is a metronome.

You can also compare your own playing speed to a recording if you’re learning from a recording, though I recommend only using it to check how close you are to playing it at full speed.

2. Play incredibly slowly

I’ve got a YouTube video about this topic that has some tips in it. This is my main practice technique when I’m learning fast passages. I play them incredibly slowly. I’ll play so slowly that I can think about each individual note and play it perfectly. This means that you’ll have to play incredibly slowly. I mean slower than 40 bpm. It’s so much slower than anything you’ll likely ever play.

It may get a little boring so be patient when you’re doing this because it can be incredibly beneficial for your playing to play this slowly. The goal isn’t to play musically, but to practice your playing technique. It’s more a mechanical exercise than a musical exercise.

Another approach to this is to play every note of the fast passage as two whole notes. Next play everything as a whole note. Then play each note as a half note. Then play every note as a quarter note, and an eighth note, until you’re playing the correct speed. This forces you to slow down and focus on each note.

Think about what you’re doing when you’re learning to play quickly. You’re training your fingers to be able to move quickly. This means that many small movements need to be done without thinking about them, because you don’t have time to think about each tiny movement at fast speeds. It also means that extraneous movements will make it a lot harder to play.

I like to separate checking your speed and practicing your speed with this technique. Checking your speed is playing it either with a metronome or a recording at the proper speed, or playing it as quickly as you can. But only use playing quickly as a way to check how close you are to the goal speed. Once you’ve checked, go back to practicing slowly.

When using this technique you should mostly be playing slowly. Most of your practice time should be spent playing incredibly slowly. Checking your speed should be used sparingly.

3. Practice at moderate speeds

This is a tip I learned from my private lessons with Joe Stump, while at Berklee College of Music. He was a big fan of this technique.

Take a fast passage and practice it at moderate speeds. Keep practicing it at a moderate speed until it starts to feel easier and easier. Once it feels much easier, increase the speed. Then practice it at the new moderate speed. Repeat this process until you’re playing it at full speed.

I like to think of this technique as practicing playing endurance. It’s similar to how some people train cardio-respiratory endurance. Choose a set amount of time to run for. Run for that amount of time multiple times. Once the difficulty drops a little bit, increase the distance or speed or your running and repeat.

Practicing at moderate speeds will get your tiny finger muscles moving repeatedly at a speed that isn’t too difficult. Eventually with some practice that speed will become easier and easier, and you’ll be able to increase the speed.

4. Slowly increase the speed

This one is pretty straight forward and goes with the above tips. Slowly increase the speed. But only increase the speed when you can play it well at a slower speed.

This isn’t the first technique that I try when I’m working on a fast passage. I practice it slowly a number of times first, and when I’ve gotten it about as fast as I think I can with that technique I’ll start slowly increasing the speed. The reason I do, and why I recommend doing this, is because you need to get the passage under your fingers first. It needs to be fairly comfortable to play to start this technique. You want to have it memorized and you want to know where the sticking points will be for you.

But the key to this being effective is to use a metronome, or a slowed down recording, and to only increase the speed when you can play it well. If you make a mistake every time you play it, leave it at the lower speed.

Some people like to increase the speed by increments of 1bpm. I don’t find that all that useful and most of the times I’ve done this I’ve increased the speed by around 10bpm. Using bigger chunks also ensures that you’re playing at a manageable speed. You want to play at a speed that’s comfortable, not a speed that’s just barely playable for you. Start slower than you think you should because you can always increase the speed if it’s too easy. But starting too fast may cause you to play the passage sloppily or with tensed muscles, which may ingrain poor playing habits.

5. Isolate sections or techniques

If a specific section is difficult to play quickly, isolate it. Play only that section over and over and over again. Make sure to play incredibly slowly and use some of the previous techniques to increase the speed, but work on that one section alone. I often do this with transitions between sections if you’re moving in a weird way on your instrument. The same can be said with playing single hand parts on piano. Play only the left hand part if that’s the difficult part for you. Sometimes there’s a tricky two notes in a piece of music. Play only those two notes super slowly to reinforce good, relaxed technique.

You can do this with specific techniques too. On guitar if you’re trying to play a fast passage of alternate picking, make sure that you can play that picking pattern fast enough on it’s own. Then try to play it all legato with hammer-ons and pull-offs to get your fingers moving fast enough.

This allows you to focus only on the difficult stuff so you can get better at that exact thing.

6. Play faster than you think you need to

This means be able to play it faster than the performance tempo. Make sure you can play it about 10 to 20 bpm faster than you’ll need to in the song. This ensures that it’ll be easy to play when you perform that song. If you can just barely play it fast enough it won’t sound good or musical, but if you know you can nail it at the proper tempo it’ll be easier to play well and make that passage sound clean.

Performing a song that has a passage that’s at your maximum playing speed isn’t fun, and won’t result in a good performance. That passage will likely be sloppy. With the nerves of performing live, that may cause you not to even be able to play it at all.

To prevent these things from happening, practice it up to a speed that’s faster than the performance speed. That way the performance will be easy to make sound good.

7. Use efficient movements

This means use small movements. For piano and guitar it means keeping your hands down by the fret board and the keys and moving them only as little as possible. Think about playing piano and moving your hand all the way up to your head every time you press a key down. That’s a lot of movement, and if you’re playing quickly you’ll have to move incredibly quickly to play anything. If you keep your hand down by the keys and only move the finger that’s pressing down the key you won’t have to move as quickly because the movements are smaller.

The same can be said for guitar. A lot of the time it’s about just lifting up your fingers a tiny bit off the fretboard. Lift them up just enough so that the string can sound underneath them, but keep them by the fretboard. Another way to move efficiently on guitar is to keep fingers down when they’re on a lower fret than the sounding fret. For example if you’re playing a passage on the 9th, 10, and 12th fret, keep each finger pressed down as you play higher frets.

Another thing that can be added here is to practice moving your hand to where it will be playing. So you want to move your hand to position before you need to play.

There are lots of examples of this depending on what instrument you’re playing, but the bottom line is to move the large parts of your body as little as possible and have your fingers do more movement.

8. Practice perfectly

By this I mean that you should practice perfect playing when you practice. Not everything you play needs to be perfect, but when you’re focusing on practicing and learning a new lick or idea, practice it so slowly you can play it perfectly. If that speed is 16th notes at 120, that’s fine. But for most people, especially when learning something new, it’ll be significantly slower, and that’s fine. The goal is to form good playing habits, not to play quickly.

So play so slowly that you’re playing perfectly. It’s much easier to form good habits the first time, than to correct bad habits later on. This means that when you’re practicing you want to play slow enough that you’re playing well. When first learning an instrument this can be frustrating because that ends up being quite slow, but as you get better that minimum speed for quality playing gets faster and faster.

When you’re practicing something think about how many times you play it well. If you play it well 5 out of 10 times, then you’ll likely play it well 5 out of 10 times when playing quickly. But if you practice slow enough to play it well 10 out of 10 times, you’ll be more likely to play it well 10 out of 10 times when it’s faster. You perform how you practice. If you practice sloppy playing, you’ll perform with sloppy playing.

The old phrase “practice makes perfect”, isn’t quite right here.

We want to think “perfect practice makes perfect.”

Final notes

Often people are in such a hurry to play quickly, that they don’t form good playing habits, and end up playing with sloppy technique. That’s not the goal here. Our goal is to form good playing habits and play with proper and efficient technique. That takes patience because it means slowing the music down enough so that you can properly form those habits.

Playing quickly with poor or sloppy technique isn’t nearly as impressive as it feels. It’s much more impressive to be able to play quickly and cleanly. And that’s something that takes a solid amount of practice, but all it takes is proper practice. This is a good thing because we can all practice properly. And with the proper type and amount of practice we’ll be able to play quickly too.

If you can have the patience to go through these practice techniques, you’ll be well on your way to playing quickly.

ISJ