Why Conventional Guitar Practice Advice Causes Sloppy Playing At Faster Speeds

Why Conventional Guitar Practice Advice Causes Sloppy Playing At Faster Speeds

You play guitar faster and cleaner by not listening to conventional speed building advice. A lot of popular guitar practice advice is wrong and actually slows down your progress.

Here are 3 pieces of conventional guitar playing wisdom to avoid in order to become a faster guitarist in less time:

1. Only focusing on increasing top speed vs. increasing 2-hand sync speed or speed of clean playing

Guitar players commonly make the mistake of only practicing at their top speed without improving their 2-hand synchronization. This approach trains you to move your hands, but at the expense of accuracy. The result is your playing sounds sloppy most of the time.

When you focus on increasing your speed with 2-hand synchronization, you play more accurately AND your top speed also increases. Learn practice strategies for building 2-hand synchronization speed by reading this guitar speed article.

2. Always starting slow, then gradually building up to speed

Practicing slow and slowly building speed leads to sloppy playing at high speeds. Using this approach trains you to play with slower and inefficient motions instead of fast and precise ones. This takes your hands out of sync at faster speeds, preventing you from playing accurately.

You can get away with inefficient movement at slow speeds but not at fast speeds. So you notice the problem at faster speeds, but when you slow down, the problem isn’t there anymore and you don’t know how to fix it. Guitarists often assume this means they just need more slow practice and get stuck in this vicious cycle.

Avoid this by breaking the item you are practicing into smaller sections of notes. Then practice a few notes at a time using short bursts of speed with pauses in between. This improves your 2-hand sync at fast speeds, makes your hand movements efficient and helps you understand which mistakes need to be fixed at slower speeds.

3. Focusing on exercises (what to practice) instead of guitar technique practicing strategies (how to practice).

Accumulating tons of guitar speed exercises is useless until you understand HOW to practice. Doing this results in having tons of exercises, but struggling to master any of them. Instead of doing this, focus on increasing the top speed of your 2-hand synchronization and learn practice methods that make this possible.

Learn methods for increasing the speed of your 2-hand synchronization by reading this guitar speed article.