Short Burst Guitar Speed & Coordination Practice

There are numerous books out with countless guitar speed drills and an abundance of exercises on the internet to improve your guitar technique.

I figured: if I’m going to write a blog about guitar technique, it needs to add something of value to the overabundance of information that is already out there.
It’s always been my impression, that most guitar players discuss technical facility as if it was merely a physical skill. I always found that interesting as it always seemed to me that gaining speed and technical proficiency is more a mental process than a physical one.
I will talk more about this later.

Before we go into that, let’s first discuss the most common approach to building technique: practicing with a metronome.

Short Melodic Bursts

One of the efficient ways to enhance your hand coordination, speed, and dexterity, is by practicing short bursts of notes with a metronome.

Here’s a couple of examples.

Guitar Technical Exercises 1

Here’s a couple more to have fun with:

More Guitar Technique 2

What most technique books that list those exercises (and pretty much all those books do), don’t touch upon, is how cool it sounds when you connect those short bursts into longer melody lines.

Here’s a couple of examples:

Technical Exercises (dragged)

And you can of course move the short bursts horizontally through a scale, as in following example:

Technical Exercises (dragged)

The Schools of Guitar Technique Practice.

With A Metronome
You start with the metronome at a very slow bpm (beats per minute)
You play along with the metronome: focusing on playing every note cleanly, even, and relaxed.
When you feel completely comfortable and relaxed, you speed the metronome up with only 3 to 5 bpm.
You practice the same line at this new tempo, till it feels totally relaxed, clean, and easy.
You keep raising the tempo on the metronome with a couple of bpm at a time.
At some point, you will have a hard time keeping up.
You then either focus on relaxing your hand and keep up or if the playing gets too sloppy, drop the metronome 20-30 bpm and slowly build it up again with small increments of a couple of bpm at a time.
This is slow but efficient practice: where you slowly but gradually, over weeks, see your picking speed improve.
The John Petrucci Way
John Petrucci has a book out with all guitar technique exercises.
He advocates, besides practicing with a metronome, to also occasionally do the following exercise:
No metronome.
Play a short musical phrase, as slowly as you possibly can.
Very very slowly and gradually speed up…
till you are playing so unbelievably fast that everything gets sloppy.
Keep moving that super fast for a couple of seconds,
then very slowly and gradually, slow down again
till you are back at your starting speed.
Then without stopping, do this whole cycle over again.
Do this a couple of times.
This is a great way to speed up the development of coordination between both hands.
The Shawn Lane Way.
Shawn passed away way too soon.
He’s always been one of my all-time favorite guitar players.
His coordination, speed, agility, and dexterity have been unmatched since.
Shawn talks in an interview, how he never really practice with a metronome or practiced things slowly.
He just right off the bat tried to play as fast as he possibly could move, and then tried to clean it up as he was going.
It’s an unusual approach to building a technical facility, but hey: apparently it worked for him. 🙂
The Victor Wooten Way.
World-renowned bassist Victor Wooten wrote a book titled “The Music Lesson”.
In his book, he touched upon the spiritual and mental aspects of musicianship.
You can find the book here:
Click HEREif you want to read “The Music Lesson”.
He explains in his book how there are certain mental tricks and techniques you can use, to improve your speed and coordination in unbelievable ways, without extra practice.
No matter how “spiritual mumbo-jumbo” the book might seem, he is really dead on and this stuff really works.
Not enough guitar players pursue and utilize the powers of their minds in accomplishing better results with lesser effort.
I wrote a must-read blog in the past about how those meditation techniques boosted my picking technique, speed, and coordination in ways I could not imagine.
Click HEREto read how I boosted my picking speed beyond what I had ever been capable of before, with no effort”.

Ideally: you want to combine the different practice techniques.

You could spend 60% of your practice time with the metronome, 20% using John Petrucci’s approach, 10% Shawn Lane’s approach, and 10% meditation and visualization.

One thing is for sure:
If you combine these 4 approaches and practice this on a daily basis, you should see stellar results in your guitar technique.

Have fun!

Conclusion

Hit me up anytime at vreny@zotzinmusic.com if you have any questions, or if you would like to book a lesson.

These free lessons are cool, but you will never experience the progress, joy, and results that my students experience in lessons when you’re learning by yourself from blogs and videos.

That is why people take lessons: way better results and progress, much more complete information, exposed to way more creative ideas than you can get from a blog or YouTube video.
There is only so much that self-study can accomplish.

If you want to see amazing results and progress in your guitar playing, buy your first lesson here and get started ASAP.