Playing Slower To Play Faster
Blog #3
The most oxymoronic-sounding advice I give to my students is play slower, it will help you play faster. In 12 years of teaching guitar there are no three words I’ve repeated more than slow it down. Some students get it so frequently that I simply say “you know what I’m going to say, right”? And a few of them know with just a look.
Being told to slow down is often really difficult advice to follow as a guitarist, for a couple reasons
1. Playing slowly isn’t fun.
2. The song, riff, or solo doesn’t sound the same when you drastically reduce the speed.
If I had to name the #1 challenge I see with learning the guitar, it would be a tie between
a) Making the time to practice.
b) Practicing more slowly.
I still struggle with practicing slowly when I’m learning a new difficult exercise, even after 22 years. Our natural instinct is to play at or near full speed, because that’s how it sounds on the recording. Here’s an example of why it can be so hard to slow down: A beginner trying to learn the intro to Sweet Home Alabama during the first few weeks of learning guitar will probably find it quite frustrating. Most beginners can’t keep up even at 25% of the original speed, and at that tempo the song is almost unrecognizable. Therefore they’ll often try to play it fast, like it is on the recording, and end up repeating mistake after mistake. Frustration has cut many a guitarist’s career short.
Our instinct to play fast is natural, so it’s difficult to suppress. But playing too quickly is the fastest way to bad technique. It also causes us to ignore nuances required to play the piece well. This might include things like hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, picking direction, or which fingers to use. When we play too quickly we find ourselves repeating the passage over and over, trying to bulldoze our way through the trouble spots and making a lot of mistakes.
There is a time and place for playing fast, and that is when you’ve worked through the piece and addressed the most difficult parts and you can flow through everything without interruption. That’s the time to start bringing the tempo up. As our musicianship grows stronger we hone our ability to learn things more quickly. But the need to start slowly never goes away. There’s virtually no instance where playing something slower is detrimental to our technique. Take a step back and recognize “I can do this. I just need to slow down and work through it.”
Rob Wolfe is a music educator in Austin, TX, who provides guitar lessons to beginner, intermediate, and advanced students on Zoom and in person. He teaches rock, classical, metal, jazz, country, pop, acoustic, electric, bass guitar, and ukulele.