Speed

Speed is a product of a few factors:

  • your brain streamlining the neurological pathways, avoiding the conscious processing centers of the brain 1

  • fast nervous system impulses contracting and relaxing the right muscles at precisely the right time

  • inhibition of excess and extraneous activity in other muscles

In some senses, speed is effortless. That’s a vast oversimplification, of course! But there is definitely a refined sense of precise balance at high speed.

(The rest of this page deals with picking hand speed, but the ideas are also applicable to fretting hand speed. Some of the techniques in Part III - Practice Techniques also touch on fretting hand as well, such as Hammer Groups.)

Acquiring Speed

You learn how to play fast by trying to play fast, finding what works for you, and then refining. Starting slowly and building up speed does not work (see Why “Start slow” fails).

Part 1: Start with speed

If this is your first attempt to alternate pick with speed, start with tremolo picking one single note on a single string:

  1. Ensure that you have a good feel with a basic picking motion - slow, or even mid-tempo, downstrokes and upstrokes. Any tempo is fine, as long as it doesn’t feel clumsy. You should feel reasonably relaxed and secure with a slow motion.

  2. Shake out any excess tension, and then tremolo pick at a good clip (sixteenth notes at 160 bpm) for a few seconds, and see and feel what happens.

  3. Stop, take a break and shake out your hand and arm. Identify any tension and try to get rid of it.

  4. Try again from step 1. Repeat this process for up to 20 minutes … any longer and you’re probably just accumulating tension.

  5. Take a longer break, an hour or so, and come back to it, see if it has come together.

Several top guitar players (Shawn Lane, Andy Wood, Martin Miller) recommend this approach. It is, in my opinion, the only way that works.

By far the best video I’ve seen for guitarists on this topic is by Troy Grady, in his terrific video “Don’t “Work Up” To Picking Speed — Start With It!” Were I to quote the valuable parts of that, I’d end up quoting the whole transcript, but here are a few choice bits:

… [On the clumsiness when first trying to go fast:] In the early stages of learning a new motion, everything’s random. … it’s your body’s way of trying out all the different ways to do something, to find the one that has the most positive feedback.

… You don’t get that feedback that it [your picking motion] is wrong until you speed it up, and then there’s tension or it can’t go past a certain speed. That’s the only way that you actually know that there was something wrong with with the technique.

… so to try and get that [feedback] we have to go fast. The question is how fast? And I would suggest not 100% fast, but somewhere a little below that. … you want to go as fast as you can to where there is still a feeling of smoothness so the fastest possible speed where there’s still some possibility of you being relaxed and it being graceful … at least 150 to 160 beats per minute sixteenth notes …

It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t even have to sound all that good yet. You just have to get somewhere in the ballpark of one of these realistic speeds right from the get-go. And if you can do that that’s a huge and important first step. Troy Grady “Don’t “Work Up” To Picking Speed — Start With It!” (YouTube)

I also put together a short video on picking, with some techniques that helped me. It is not as generally informative as Troy Grady’s video above, but perhaps it will help you as well.

I’ve also found the following practice techniques listed in this book helpful:

Part 2: Assess and clean up

When things start to click at a high tempo, it’s time to slow down, reverse engineer to see what you’re doing, and then work on that to refine it.

Slowing down is essential once you have the base motions in place. You can assess your levels of tension and accuracy, and ensure that you’re actually getting the tone you want to get while playing. Accuracy is vital. If you play so fast that you miss notes, or you lose rhythmic accuracy, your playing will sound messy, and actually somehow feel slower.

Continue pushing the envelope, but always make sure that your fundamentals are solid!

1

This is why you sometimes can’t readily explain what you’ve just played when you play something fast – you might have to stop and think. Your conscious mind has to replay and analyze.