Guitar Speed Exercises

Beginner guitarists generally wonder how professional guitar players play their instrument at such an awesome pace. You need to know that playing guitar chords and notes in a rapid progression requires a lot of time and practice. It may even take months or years. Along with time and practice, it also requires dedication and determination to do that job.

A Few Speed Exercises

Learning any kind of musical instrument undoubtedly needs a lot of regular practice. The main key in developing, increasing, and maintaining speed is to practice for a certain amount of time everyday. If you happen to ask professional musicians regarding the amount of practice they do daily, they would probably say four to five hours, and some may even say more. In case it is not possible for your to practice for such a long time, you can reduce your practice time to one or two hours. When it comes to practicing guitar for speed and accuracy, there is no set pattern of exercises, tones, notes, etc. The following are important points to be considered when trying to improve speed on electric bass and lead guitars.

Electric Guitar
Electric speed exercises have a good impact on the rhythm and chord changing skills in guitar playing. If you want to increase the speed of changing chords on the guitar fretboard, you should practice playing the chord combinations, be it simple relative chords or power chords. Note that all individual chords should be played at different positions across the fretboard. Doing so will make your chording hand move smoothly on the fretboard allowing you to even play lead in between rhythm sections.

Bass Guitar
Before practicing bass speed exercises, you need to develop substantial amount of strength in your fingers. This is because shifting from one position of the bass guitar's fretboard to another rapidly can be a difficult task. You must gain control over all your fingers and be able to move them the way you want on the fretboard. In improving bass guitar playing speed, the note patterns are slightly less complicated than those in lead guitar drills.

Lead Guitar
In playing lead on the guitar, individual notes matter a lot. For making the lead fast and smooth, you need to do some lead speed exercises. And the main part of these exercises includes individual notes to be played in certain sets throughout the fretboard. In these exercises, tabs generally come with numbers individually mentioned on the fretboard. These numbers denote on which frets you have to place your chording fingers. You can say that these exercise patterns are variations of the scales. In order to practice these exercises the right way, you first need to be proficient in the normal guitar scales on all strings. There is no fixed pattern set for the notes. You simply have to go up and down the positions on the fretboard in a continual manner, with the notes being in the respective scale, according to the lead tablature.

Doing Speed Exercises

The basic guitar speed exercise is to practice the scales on all strings. Following is an example of the 'G' scale played from the 6th string.

e------------------------------------------------------------------|
B------------------------------------------------------------------|
G------------------------------------------------------------------|
D-----2-4-5------------------------------------------------------|
A-----2-3-5-------------------------------------------------------|
E-------3-5-------------------------------------------------------|

You can refer to the below tab which tells you which positions to play on the fretboard. This is a good example of the chromatic scale.

e------------------------------------------------------1-2-3-4-------|
B--------------------------------------------1-2-3-4-----------------|
G----------------------------------1-2-3-4---------------------------|
D------------------------1-2-3-4-------------------------------------|
A--------------1-2-3-4-----------------------------------------------|
E-----1-2-3-4--------------------------------------------------------|

Now, in the below guitar tab, you can see that there are some variations in the numbers of the scale. Making similar variations in your practicing sessions will really be beneficial for your guitar playing. A good way of practicing is to play individual notes in any scale in a random order. Along with the notes of the chording hand, you also need to pay attention to the up-down style of picking the respective strings.

e--------------------------------------------------------2-4-3-1-------|
B----------------------------------------------1-4-3-2-----------------|
G------------------------------------2-4-3-1---------------------------|
D--------------------------1-4-3-2-------------------------------------|
A----------------2-4-3-1-----------------------------------------------|
E------1-4-3-2---------------------------------------------------------|

In this exercise, there are just three notes to be played in a set, whereas the previous exercises had four. Start from the 6th string to the 1st and then again to the 6th, by referring to the numbers.

e--------------------------------------------------------1-2-3-4-3-2--------------------------------------------------------|
B----------------------------------------------1-2-3-----------------4-3-2--------------------------------------------------|
G------------------------------------1-2-3-----------------------------------4-3-2------------------------------------------|
D--------------------------1-2-3--------------------------------------------------------4-3-2-------------------------------|
A----------------1-2-3----------------------------------------------------------------------------4-3-2---------------------|
E------1-2-3-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4-3-2------------|

This exercise has to be played carefully, as there are four notes in a set, out of which the last three are used as the first three in the next set. Doing this exercise will really get a flow of your fingers on the fretboard.

e-1-2-3-4----------------------------------------------6-7-8-9--|
B------2-3-4-5------------------------------------6-7-8-9-------|
G-----------3-4-5-6--------------------------6-7-8-9------------|
D----------------4-5-6-7----------------6-7-8-9-----------------|
A---------------------5-6-7-8------6-7-8-9----------------------|
E--------------------------6-7-8-9---------------------------------|

This is just a short explanation on speed exercises for the guitar. It is well said that one can never get to the top of what guitars or any other musical instruments have to offer. So it is not at all possible to run out of the variations in tunes and notes when it comes to practicing playing the guitar. Use a wide range of exercises as much as you can, but make sure that you do not miss on the tone quality and melody when concentrating only on speed.