When some people play guitar fast, we look at them in astonishment and question whether it is viable for us to do the same? Let us review the situation and see if we can also do something to hasten our speed of playing the instrument. The most important asset in this venture is a metronome, which can be bought from a music depot, stolen from a loving auntie or downloaded from the net. A stolen metronome may not be able to help you to play the guitar quick, as there are generally no shortcuts to success in life. Most of us look for the quickest and most painless way to do things, and that is why most of us are not playing guitar at the speed of light.

Okay, you have your metronome and an mental attitude adjustment so you are ready to start. Now you want something by which you can do your practice sessions and these could include a part of a song, which has a solo segment, an exercise like a series of arpeggios or a picking exercise. You would have to select your materials wisely, since you are keen to record your speed of playing in terms of the settings, which you have to do to your metronome. It is not mandatory to spend time trying to study the musical passage as something new since you have to be familiar with the piece if you want to gauge your speed of playing. When you are familiar it means that the finger, hand and arm muscles ought to work smoothly so that you do not halter anywhere along the way.

So that is the next thing you need and in order to play the guitar fast you need to be able to play slowly. The part chosen by you for practicing speed should not be too easy, and at the same time, not too tough either. That is why you are using an exercise or an isolated musical passage rather than a song or long solo.

Now that everything is ready for you to begin, first check with the metronome to be aware of your present speed of playing. Then take the metronome to a level, which is not very high, and aim to reach that level. Note that this is something that you need to do without: muscle stress. You want to practice playing guitar quick without building a level of tension in the muscles that will work against your goal. To avoid stress, just stop thinking about the time you have your set goals in the metronome and you just try to accomplish that forgetting about the time you are taking. The whole idea is not to hasten up the process to play the guitar quick, but to reach your goal by taking one step at a time.

So if you pick out a passage to practice in order to play quick, and you devote some time every day to practicing, your guitar playing speed will start to growth. The day you find that you have mastered one passage, choose another one, which is more difficult. The issue is to start by knowing where you stand now and then set a goal which would you like to reach in the near future.