CHAPTER TWO The seven principles of guitar speed

Key Principle Of Guitar Speed #1

Posture
As ridiculous as it might seem, having a correct posture is extremely important for any guitarist, playing any style of music. There is no exception for a guitarist who is playing an electric guitar, at a fast rate of speed. In fact, this is one of those big secrets that is easily overlooked. Bad posture for a guitarist who wants to develop a significant amount of speed would be slouching. Correct posture is an upright position with relaxed arms and neck. You should never hang your head directly over your guitar neck. Instead you should always keep your back straight, without stressing the muscles, and keep your head upright and relaxed. It seems silly, but this is number one of the Key Principles Of Guitar Speed. Now reflect upon the images below for further clarity.

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Key Principle Of Guitar Speed #2

Patience
Do not be fooled by the word patience. It doesnt mean taking years to master something. It means the opposite. This is extremely key to developing your guitar speed, as most beginning guitarists try to rush things. Each time you try to make the development of speed happen faster, you set yourself back by extreme amounts of time. How much time? Just trust me. As someone who could have reaped the rewards years earlier, I wasted years just trying to get fast at guitar. It is quite possible, though not guaranteed, to go from start to finish within a few months or less. The guaranteed part all depends on how willing you are to just do things by the book. That was my problem. I fought the wisdom that had already been laid down before me. If you are serious about this DONT DO THAT! Commit yourself, because a few months is nothing within the lifespan of an individual.

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Key Principle Of Guitar Speed #3

Listen
Im not talking about listening to the music or what you are playing, Im talking about listening to the physical aspects of guitar training. It is key to be able to distinguish the difference between good, progressive tension in the hands, and harmful tension in the hands. How do we determine this? If your hands are warm and you can feel the muscles slightly beneath the skin of your hands, then you are making progress in training your muscle memory. If it feels like the skin is so taught that your hand begins to ache, you must stop. If you do not do this, then you will be setting yourself back months on end. It could quite possibly take you days to recover, and the name of the game is daily progress. A good example of this would be if the meat of your thumb starts to ache in your picking hand. That is a very bad type of tension and this area of the hand should not feel pain at all. It is common for the hands to be stiff, no matter how good you are, when you first start practicing on a particular day. Do not stress over this. However, your hands should be worked up to a state of Jello, where they are so strong that you cannot feel them. Its when you can feel them too much that you should be alarmed. If you are serious, then you will not break this rule. Think of it as the rule of thumb. This is very, very important. I neglected, like many guitarists now, this golden rule, no matter how aware of it I was. There are a lot of great guitarists out their who are quite famous, who also broke this rule. They recovered, like myself, but why set yourself back so many years?

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Key Principle Of Guitar Speed #4

Proper Picking
When it comes to picking, it would be totally unfair to say that this is right and this is wrong. It is simply not that black and white. Everyone has a different style. You may find that figuring out how to hold a guitar pick for different techniques and strategies will require massive amounts of experimenting over the years. I can not tell you what to do, because no one hand is alike. I can however give you some advice on the different approaches to holding a guitar pick and picking itself. This is a process to figure out and you should try every approach for a while to see what works best for your picking hand.

Holding the guitar pick

When it comes to holding a guitar pick, there is one approach that is the correct approach. Anything outside of this is just plain wrong. You should use only your thumb and index finger to hold the guitar pick never use your thumb, index finger and middle finger. This will lock up the meat of the thumb and make the muscles tense in your picking hand, preventing you from reaching a good amount of speed.

The index finger

The index finger is a tricky thing to figure out. For years I pinched the pick between the thumb and index finger, which is shown in the image below.

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The Pinch Hold

Some guitarists are able to use this kind of pick hold effectively. It didnt work for me and I found that when I did this, the joints in my index finger would lock up and my hand would become very sore. When I was working on exercises, my stamina was drastically reduced. By making a slight alteration with the index finger, I was able to keep a constantly relaxed feeling in my picking hand. By simply sliding the last joint of my index finger back towards the palm of my hand, I was able to increase my speed dramatically. This type of pick hold looks like this..

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Closed Index Finger Pick Hold

Hand posture
The posture of the hand is also extremely important for improving ones technique and cleanliness on the guitar. For years I used an open hand approach, but eventually found that when it came to playing solos, it made the movement of the pick to extreme, depleting my accuracy for single note action. This open hand pick hold looks like this.

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Open Hand Pick Hold

When it comes to playing fast rhythms, especially intricate strums or fast metal structures, I still use this type of pick hold. I do this, because the hand now acts like a pendulum, which gives me a better swing for strumming all six strings in fast succession. For all my solo work and some instances of rhythm guitar, I now use the closed hand pick hold, which looks like this.

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Closed Hand Pick Hold

The closed hand pick hold is very effective for soloing, because the minute movements of the pick are refined, and it keeps the pick anchored in the area where it should be. If you choose to pick like this, then it is very important that you not clench your hand into a ball or fist. The hand must be relaxed, and because the remaining fingers are not stretched out, it naturally is much more relaxing. You have to remind yourself when you are working on exercises to not tense the hand with either approach.

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The pick itself

The guitar pick is very important. Im not going to address what pick size or thickness to use, because this is a very personal preference, but I am going to talk about how much of the pick you should hold. If you are striving for rapid speeds, then you need to hold the pick close to the plectrum (tip of the pick), leaving only an eighth of an inch or so exposed. It is ideal to only use the very tip of the pick when practicing. This way, when you are changing from string to string, you wont have the pick buried by too much of the string, and can neatly glide to the next string. You can think of it as brushing the very top, outer layer of the string. Picking with the very tip of the pick is also ideal for pinch harmonics, which we will be getting to later.
Amount Of Plectrum

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The two angles of the pick

Again, you must find what is comfortable for you, but there are two angles working at any one time with the pick. The rotation angle The side angle

Here is a break down of those two angles.

Pick Rotation Angle

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As you can see, this is a perfect circle consisting of 360 degrees. The best way to apply this is to grab a guitar pick, hold it up to this image and center it within the circle. Take the guitar pick and rotate the left side of it clockwise until the left side is in perfect alignment with the green line. This will roughly be the rotational angle that you will want to pick single notes with. If this angle is too extreme for your tastes, you may modify this to comfort, but keep in mind the rotational factor.
Side Angle

When the side angle and the rotational angle are combined, the results can greatly improve your picking efficiency and clarity. This side angle is also quite necessary for producing incredible sounding pinch harmonics.

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The pinkie anchor

A lot of well known guitarists will anchor their pinkie finger to the body of the guitar. Sometimes this comes about by habit and sometimes it is a conscience decision. It keeps the picking hand steady, but I personally choose not to use this approach, as it tends to lock my hand up. Again, using the pinkie as an anchor is neither good nor bad, and comes back to a personal preference. If you choose to do this, you can either anchor the pinkie finger with just the tip of the pinkie, or with the side of the pinkie. Both approaches are generally done just below the High E string, and in some cases the pinkie is used to hook around the lead pickup. It also might just depend upon the guitar. A lot of guitarists who play on classic shred guitars such as Ibanezs and Jacksons will tend to do this, though not all of them will. It also has a lot to do with the overall structure of the guitar, and on my axe of choice, the Les Paul, I prefer not to do this, simply because of the structure of the guitar. I also studied classical guitar for a time. If you take classical guitar lessons, then a serious classical guitar teacher will want to break you of the habit of anchoring your pinkie, for the benefit of a looser hand for finger picking purposes. When I do finger picking, I always anchor my pinkie to the body of the guitar, but found that the traditional classical approach works best for my needs on an electric. Again, this is always an issue of preference.

Key Principle Of Guitar Speed #5

Less arm more wrist
A very important thing to understand about fast picking is that you need to learn to take the emphasis away from your arm. This is a common bad habit that generally forms as soon as a guitarist firsts picks up the guitar. Its all in the wrist. At times you may even want to go so far as to practice the proper arcing motion without the use of a guitar pick, and without actually playing the guitar. This is also why Key Principle Of Guitar Speed #1, Posture is so important. Naturally you must use the muscles in your arm to power the motion of the wrist, but if you are not in a relaxed, upright position then you will cause a great deal of stress on your shoulder.

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To be more specific, youll feel it in the front side of your shoulder (Deltoid muscle), just around the armpit.

Key Principle Of Guitar Speed #6

Lightness of touch
A lot of guitarists who have started out playing on acoustics are well aware of just how taught the strings on an acoustic guitar can be. This requires forceful picking, but if you are playing on an electric, which is really the guitar to develop speed on, then you will have to correct this habit. Picking lightly and only using a small portion of the plectrum is very, very important. When those two principles are combined, the results are significant, and can add a great percentage increase to your speed. Be mindful not to pick too lightly though, or the notes will not have enough snap to them. Find the medium and go with it.

**Key Principle Of Guitar Speed #7 is contained within Chapter 5 Basic speed drills 3 finger exercises, as it is a more appropriate place for the 7th principle.

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