The most important thing to ALWAYS remember when working on technique is that speed is a byproduct of play CLEAN. Don’t worry about being fast at first, just worry about making sure both hands and halves of your brain are synced up and moving in perfect unison. Right when a finger hits a fret, make sure your pick hits the string at the exact same moment. Play AS SLOW AS YOU CAN STAND. Seriously, like you’re watching a video at 25% or something on youtube. Put ALL of your focus into making your fretting fingers and pick move in PERFECT unison. Stop playing as fast as you can and start playing as PERFECT as you can.Now, I know no one wants to hear that you should play slow, people say it all the time. Just like Ricky Bobby, we all wanna go fast. But really you have to learn the importance and power of playing slow and perfectly.
So after you sync your hands up, work on the very basic mechanics of your fretting fingers and picking hands separately. You do that by doing your FASTEST tremolo picking with the picking hand. Think like youre in the Matrix- when you think you hit your MAX speed, stop thinking and start KNOWING that you are faster. If you cant visualize yourself doing it, your physiology probably wont make it happen. Get your mind right first.
Then as far as your fretting hand goes, start doing trills with every finger set, and on all the strings. So if index is 1, middle 2, ring 3, and pinky 4. Do trills with 1&2, 1&3, 1&4, 2&3, 2&4, and 3&4. Do this trills as long as you can until your fingers are jelly. Dimebag talks about this in a video of a clinic he did in the 90’s. I think he also talked about it in his guitar world column “Riffer Madness”.
THEN after you’ve done both of these, go back to syncing your hands together but this time try alternate picking the trills and keeping them in perfect unison. Speed them up and slow them down together to gain control over this. You should be able to perfectly pick as fast as you can trill.
Another thing to consider is when you do all of this, the less motion your fingers and pick make, the faster they will be able to make it to the next note. So practice setting your pick down top of the string and REALLY focus on moving the pick just enough to make it to the other side of the string. Same with hammer ons and pull offs, really work on barely moving your fingers. One caveat with that, though, is it does require finger strength to make a nice even note come out.
ANOTHER thing to consider, for dynamics and control, is to make sure your up stroke and down stroke sound IDENTICAL. Same with your hammer ons and pull offs. The notes will be different, but make their volume and clarity the same and as equal as possible.
Now I want you all to understand how effective this way of thinking is, and believe me when I say that I have literally watched people improve IMMENSELY in a matter of 30 minutes to an hour. Seriously. It just depends on how focused you stay, and of course there are some physical limitations, which actually kind of leads me to another point. Like ANY other muscle group in your body, you don’t get stronger and faster so much from exercise itself, but the rest and recovery that follows. So work on this stuff hard until your fingers bleed, and then take the rest of the day off and relax. Stretch your fingers, hands, wrists, arms, everything.
Ive been meaning to make a video lesson about this for some time now, and I apologize for not doing it. Ive been very busy with life so I haven’t had a ton of time to focus on guitar as much, but Im definitely finding time for it again. Sorry if that was too much info to throw at you, I don’t know how to be brief with explanations.
