Speed  

There's always alot of talk about building speed. The bad news is that all the articles in the world won't do the work neccesary in your place. The good news is that with practice everyday, you'll slowly but surely build speed. That's one oppinion of course. Personally, I didn't do daily exercises dedicated to speed.

I just played guitar everyday. For some time. I did chords, scales, on the tempo that felt confortable for me. Then it kinda sped up with time.

Do you have toughts like:

- "My fingers are too bulky" ?
- "I'm too slow" ?
- "Stupid fingers" ?
- "I can't imagine my fingers going faster than this. It's just not possible." ?

I know I did. Here's some good news: If you look yourself in the mirror while playing, you actually look like you play faster. I don't know it's just an illusion or we just think we play slower than we really do. It works when u get filmed also. Even more great news is that EVERY GUITARIST had this problem. The answer is just keep persevering, keep trying, in a month or 2, you'll get it.

If you really want some exercises, I'll give you an example. You can derive hundreds of exercises out of this one:



I hope it's pretty simple to understand. You just do a "chromatic scale". Every four notes on all strings starting from the 6th string (thickest one) and landing on the first one. Do it at different tempos. After you can do this like a piece of pie, just start playing with the notes. Mix them up, "dance", everything that can cross your mind. Even try to learn a guitar solo if you think you are up to it.

Do so and start noticing that each and every one of those solos fit into certain patterns called scales. We'll talk about them in some future posts.

Get to work now.

PS: When you get bored, imagine yourself playing Wembley. That might help.