Speed Learning Guitar

Practising the guitar is all about getting better at it. Repetition is necessary but repeat too much and progress can stop, as I found out. 

Learning how to learn is probably the most useful thing I have ever learned. Speed learning guitar doesn't take hours per day, it takes only minutes per day

I remember noticing the difference between types of practice I was doing. One day learning something brand new and another day refining and improving something that I had learned before.

Since the key to speed learning is constantly challenging yourself, learning something new is easy because it's usually difficult at the beginning and that really concentrates the brain. But when it comes to 'refining' something - and by refining I mean making it sound better, faster, improving it - I had to work out how to practice the same thing over and over without getting bored or relying on muscle memory. That's what really transformed my sessions.

Design and Redesign your practise sessions

I literally wasted years believing that simple repetition would lead to improvement. It didn't! I remember almost falling asleep during one practice session while I went over and over the same scale again and again. I guess I used to think that just by practicing for longer, I would automatically improve. 

So it wasn't until I began to work out how to identify when muscle memory takes over and dynamically changed my routines accordingly, that I began to speed learn again.  I knew it was important to repeat to learn, but I just couldn't keep my focus while doing the exact same thing over and over.

What I learned in those years is that the amount of time you spend practicing, won't necessarily reflect the in the results you get.

I knew that my practice sessions had to become dynamic and adaptive. As I improved I had to change things, not just lazily repeat.

It isn't how long you spend doing it, it's how you do it. 

So how did I do it?

I wanted to find new ways to practice the same thing over and over while maintaining the same level of concentration I had when I learned something brand new.

I started by using my metronome to increase the difficulty level. For example, I would play a phrase in quarter notes, then switch to eighth note triplets, then switch to 16th notes, all within a minute of practicing.

Now I had to focus on the timing changes and that meant concentration.

Then I started to notice that when I practiced a scale or lead phrase, that I always played it the same way. For example, I would always start on a down pick stroke and use alternate picking.

When I tried to switch to starting on an upstroke instead, it became much more difficult – especially as  would speed up the metronome. So I incorporated this as a technique to re-focus myself, just like I’d done when changing the timing against a metronome click.

When I started doing this for all the phrases and scales I thought were easy, they became difficult again. So I went back over all of them using this pick stroke modification to make them difficult.

 It didn’t take long before I could play everything faster with a lot more accuracy. My timing was improving and so was my left-right hand coordination.

I hadn’t been specifically practicing to play faster, but that was the result I was getting.

Nowadays I use a lot of similar techniques to keep my improvement constant. One of my favorites and most effective is taking the musical phrase out of context and completely changing the timing of it. I will keep doing that until I run out of ways to change it. It’s bit like learning to draw portraits by drawing them upside down so the image becomes completely unfamiliar and you can’t rely on your facial pattern memory to help.

By the time I get back to playing the phrase the original way, I find it easy because I have learned to play it upside down, back to front and sideways - so to speak.

I also use a lot of legato phrasing as a technique to re-introduce difficulty. Anything works really, I just have to make sure I don't get bored.

Any questions?