Why Do Guitarists Feel the Need For Speed?

In my years of teaching music, I’ve found myself asked a lot about speed development and a lot of my technique-based teaching puts an emphasis on building speed, accuracy, timing and tone. These four areas I feel are very important but are by no means the only important areas of developing our technique on the guitar.

In my recent years of teaching however, I’ve been approached by students who’s personal goals aren’t necessarily to become the next greatest shredder on the planet. They may not envision playing fast picked lines, technically challenging riffs that cross the strings in awkward ways etc. They might be songwriters, focusing on having basic facility on the instrument to write actual music. Or they might be guitarists who aren’t so enamoured with the ‘guitar solo’. And I’m 100% behind these students. Whilst I am sympathetic to their personal goals, I still encourage them to develop their technique beyond their desired area of focus.

Learning to develop speed on the guitar, not only develops speed, but it teaches us a lot about how we learn, memorise, develop ideas, practice and gives us a foundation that we can play within.

As we develop speed, we can’t just ‘go for it’ from the starting gun. We have to start slow, we have to know what we’re playing, how we’re playing. It makes us focus on economy of movement, good fretting and picking technique. We learn about the timing of what we’re playing, so we can confidently synchronise the left and right hand.

If we’re learning a fast passage of music in a song, we must learn how to memorise the series of notes. It can help to have knowledge of basic scale positions and sequences to attribute these fast passages too. This helps with theory, recollection and memorisation of music. This memorisation process along with breaking things down into smaller bite size pieces helps us develop healthy practice habits. We take care of our playing and our hands.

Taking this further, when it comes to pushing our speed. We learn how our body memorises and learns new skills. To build speed, once we’ve laid the foundations of the thing we’re working up to speed, we need to push it. A little bit like how an athlete builds stamina or muscle. They push in increments, just beyond their capability and then bring it back down. This lets the body know that we’re trying to do something different than normal, so then it starts to adapt. The key here is to listen carefully to your playing and your body to know how and when to move between ‘slow’ practice and ‘pushing the envelope’ practice. A little stress is good, but just hammering away for long periods of time develops bad habits. Eventually you bring the accuracy and speed together.

The whole process is good for your control over the instrument, discipline of practice and most importantly your overall technical ability. Having a high threshold of speed in your playing is going to help you be more relaxed when playing simpler/slower material. When we’re playing live, we won’t feel like the songs getting away from us. When we want to go for something a little bit flashy in the middle of a tasty solo, we’ve got some fuel in the can for it. I’m not suggesting that every John Mayer fan needs to shred like John Petrucci. We must remember this is art, its also personal in some ways. So we have to find our balance. My encouragement with this blog is for players who may be avoiding ‘speed’ exercises, licks and riffs may actually find there’s a lot of benefit from pushing outside their comfort zone once in a while.

I myself also need to do this occasionally, even though I find I’m often asked to play more technical rock music, I like to look after my playing. Keeping your technique together is like looking after a fine vehicle. The car will serve you well if you look after it. It will be able to go fast when you need it to, it’ll be able to go far when you want it to. But if you don’t look after it, it becomes unpredictable, it could cost you a few journeys and even more money and time! So get the metronome out, work on pushing your speed, just a fraction.