The Search for Speed

Hey y'all - hope you're all enjoying the festive season. One quick thing before I launch into a blog post on every guitarists nightmare, Jim, Adam and I would all appreciate it if you could really quickly vote on The Tone King's awesome competition. Just click on where it says 'vote' in the previous sentence and vote for Jimstudios! Thanks a lot!

Now then... speed

The human race as an entity has always had a desire for speed. There is very little logic behind it admittedly as in many cases it increases danger - faster cars, faster planes, - but it appears we can't stop trying to quicken the pace of life. Forever we are searching for faster computers, quicker downloads, faster cures for diseases; apparently it would seem we are obsessed by it. And oh yes you guessed it, the pathogen that is speed has always been in music. Let me explain.

You see being able to do something quickly in many cases makes it more appealing. Hearing a drum fill made up of semiquavers (16th notes for all you across the pond) at about 80BPM is pretty dull. Hearing that same fill at 180BPM is much more impressive. Its the same on guitar, we want speed, and WE WANT IT NOW. Well I'm afraid to say there are no magical fixes and like I said earlier, here comes every guitarists worst nightmare - trying to get faster and faster.

The problem with speed is its rather scientific. Your muscles in your hand must be trained to move your fingers faster and faster (apologies if i've got my science wrong there, but my theory is correct). However the most crucial part of this is the movements must be clean and even. Try and follow me here - if you can move your first finger to your second finger very quickly, but your second to third is slow, then the pattern will be uneven and as a result you'll get an uneven sound *pause for breath*. There is a solution to this problem.

If anyone reading this takes music lessons you will have heard your teacher say more than once 'practice it slowly'. Trust me, they're not trying to annoy you. You're body must be forced to learn something new - its called muscle memory. You've already experienced this a lot learning chords and being able to change them quickly. Even an experienced guitarist will be constantly developing muscle memory. Once it is in place for a particular movement though you can start to speed it up.

Im not going to go into huge amounts of detail (at some point we might make a tutorial on speed but for now there's all sorts out there) but practice slowly. Its the key. If you're practicing a hammer on pull off pattern and want it to be really fast, practice on a clean tone on your amp and do it slow making sure everything sounds in time and nice and tidy. I hate to burst anyone's bubble at this point but you won't ever be able to play fast if you don't start slow.

Speed is a wonderful thing to have as a guitarist and it does distinguish you above the rest if you can play quickly. The likes of Mark Tremonti, Kirk Hammett, John Frusciante, Synyster Gates, Corey Beaulieu didn't learn to play fast, they learnt to play slow.

Peace, Linus