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To non-guitarists, hearing a blazingly quick solo is just good entertainment. The focus often turns away from the intricacies of the composition towards the more aesthetic, virtuoso effects of playing guitar fast. To guitarists, who have been playing for some time at least, speed is often seen as the icing on the cake, which can seem overwhelming as an addition to the already complex theory that goes into composition.

If you get too bogged down with learning to play fast, the speed element will inevitably end up being used (or more accurately, abused) to cover up your lack of melodic exploration. It will be too tempting to see it as an easy road to impressing the casual listener, rather than feeling satisfied with your personal interpretation of scales and their variations.

You can become jealous of other guitarists' ability to play fast and, as a result, attempt to focus all your time on speed, sacrificing solid theory time for more physically orientated drills. Or, you can accept that speed is something that develops naturally from the solid foundations of theoretical fretboard knowledge and confidence.

That is why speed should be put to the back of your mind when learning to really navigate scales and arpeggios in your own personal way. What you'll find is, as your playing develops, moments of speed playing will leap out at you. You'll feel exactly when a faster tempo will compliment your music rather than feel it must be the sole purpose of your music. Even when soloing in heavy metal!

See, you can easily identify those guitarists who have been lazy with theory and composition to focus 90% on physical speed because, when they play, their music lacks any real substance or personal expression. They may zip up and down scales in the correct key, gracefully sweep arpeggios here and there, and pull off runs in their sleep, but it's often nothing more than just a mesmorising illusion.

So get your priorities straight. Don't let the mesmorising blur of virtuoso guitar playing make you feel like you're lagging behind. One day, given the right focus during your practice sessions, you'll be able to use speed as just another textural effect in your music, along with the hammer-on, slide, tap, bend etc.

Learning Guitar - Speed Comes Naturally

Let me give an example. Take the basic major scale in its "boxed" position. Someone devoted completely to speed playing may learn to pick this pure scale up and down, using a metronome to gradually speed up until they reach a speed where each note in the scale begins to blur with the next (as the human brain struggles to separate the notes amidst the speed). It has a "rollar coaster" effect, and can sound impressive to the untrained ear. However, all this guitarist is doing is playing the scale's natural interval sequence of notes, from 1 - 7, then back down again. Just very fast of course.

The physical application is quick but, to the ear, the theoretical application gets tired quick.

Use it wisely.

This guitarist has prioritised speed over learning how to really use the different intervals of the scale expressively. The latter requires exploration and understanding of the fretboard, using the mind just as much as the fingers. This guitarist will soon find out that playing quick is not so easy when you're not doing a mere "straight run" of scales and arpeggios.

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