How To Improve Your Speed On The Guitar
When you practice the guitar, how do you know what you should be working on specifically to become a better guitar player?
Unless you’ve had a lot of practice finding and spotting mistakes this can be challenging to do by yourself. This can feel very frustrating because you want to get better, but you’re sometimes unsure what it is you should be doing so you’re left with two options:
Needle in a haystack approach (You just start guessing where you think the challenges are)
You wait an entire week so that we can answer your questions
What if you knew how to better solve the challenges you face at home?
How much more progress do you think you could make?
What would mean you could do on the guitar that you can’t do right now?
Here’s how to start getting better at spotting mistakes and to speed up your progress:
Finding Challenges:
Pick something you’re finding tricky to play
Record yourself on video playing the exercise for 30-60 seconds
Watch back the video and focus on each of your hands individually and ask yourself:
In what ways can I improve the movements in my fretting hand?
In what ways can I improve the movements in my picking hand?
Practicing The Challenges:
Once you have found some challenges, what I don’t want you to do is to start practicing all of them. All I’d like you to do is to pick one of the challenges in your list and focus on improving in that area over the next week.
You should make sure to practice slow to begin with get gain control of the new movement/habit you’re trying to build, then gradually speed up.
This may seem challenging to begin with, but it will get easier to more you do it. And it may appear to be a slow way of approaching your guitar playing. Only focusing one or two things each week.
But what happens is that your guitar playing will be compounded over time. Instead of being mediocre of lots of things, you will raise your standards when you become better in a few key areas.
Guitar Learning Is Something That You Cannot Cram.
Like when you cram for a test, and try to memorise lots over a couple of days, how much do you remember in a week?
For guitar, it’s similar, that it takes time, not only for your brain, but for your muscle memory both combined to develop your skill and put it in your long-term memory.
That’s why people who have been playing for 5 years plus, pause for a while can come back to it so much quicker than those who have been playing for a few months and then take a break.
On top of this, the other reason to focus on only a few key areas in the short term is that your hearing will improve as well, so your ability to hear other mistakes in your playing will improve as a consequence of beginning to focus on a few key areas.
If you need more guidance on both identifying what your key weak areas are, and also what the easiest and best way to solve your challenges are, that’s going to produce the fastest results for you.
Then find the right guitar teacher for you. Someone who is able to see the path that you’ve got to take and give the right directions and feedback to help you develop your skills as a guitar player.
About Guitar Tuition East London
A supportive community of guitar players and guitar teachers based in East London, England. Helping their guitar students to develop their own skills of playing beyond learning the basics of guitar. Focused on helping those who are really passionate and love music and want to develop creativity and a lifelong skill for themselves and share it with friends and family.