How to Play Guitar Faster
Lead guitar players like to play their solos. Some want to be melodic solo players, others want to play soulful blues solos. Many rock guitar players strive to play solos as fast as possible. Learning to play guitar faster is more a matter of building upon the basic playing skills you have and gradually increasing the speed with which you can perform these skills. While fast isn't always the playing style needed for a song, there are many instances where fast guitar playing can be used to showcase your skills and add color to a solo.
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Instructions
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Practice basic major scales to perfect the techniques you need to play guitar faster. Major scales are probably a part of your practice routine anyway. A major scale can sound boring, so using some of these techniques to spice it up will demonstrate to your ear how well they work. Begin with a C major scale.
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Play the C major scale at normal speed until you play it smoothly in several locations on the neck of your guitar. Once you have gotten the scale down so you can play it efficiently at a reasonable speed, it's time to pick up the pace.
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Double pick the notes of the C major scale to hear how this technique can increase the speed of your playing. Play each note of the scale two times, first with a downstroke of the pick, then with an upstroke. Grasp the pick as close to the tip as you can between your thumb and index finger. Holding the pick in this fashion decreases the amount of pick that contacts the strings, which decreases the time it takes you to strike the next note. this same technique can be applied to notes outside of a scale pattern as well.
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Sweep pick arpeggios. An arpeggio is a broken chord, or the notes of a chord played individually, one after the other. Building parts of your solo inside chord shapes and playing them arpeggio style saves time by placing your hand in a single position for several notes. Whenever possible, play the notes inside a chord shape, lifting your fingers away as you bring your pick down or up the strings in a sweeping motion. This is a good way to produce a lot of notes with little movement.
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Finger tap notes to play more notes at a time. To do this, set your pick aside and use the index finger of your picking hand to tap out notes higher up on the fretboard while you play groupings of notes using the pressure from the fingers of your fret hand.
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Practice, as well as the combination of all these techniques (economy picking, double picking and tapping), will improve the speed and quality of your playing over time.
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References
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