Play Guitar Faster in 10 Days

How to Develop Effective Practice Habits

Establishing effective practice habits is crucial to increasing your playing speed. In this lesson, Justus breaks down guiding practice principles to achieve growth on guitar.
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How to Stay Motivated (and Break Out of Playing Plateaus)

Playing plateaus are an annoying and common aspect of any guitarist’s musical journey. In this quick video, Justus breaks down how he finds fresh inspiration when things get stagnant.

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‍How Does Gear Impact Speed?

There are a dizzying amount of factors that can affect how easy it is to play your guitar at high speeds. In this lesson, Justus gives an overview of how to find your ideal gear setup.

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‍Technique, Touch, and Posture

It’s important to take an inventory of how you hold and play the guitar to address anything that could potentially hold you back from playing fast. When it comes to developing speed, even an adjustment that saves you milliseconds can make a big difference. This lesson features Justus’ thoughts on technique, touch, & posture.

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Day 1. Simplicity

We’ll start off nice and easy with Simplicity – an arpeggio-based exercise in the key of D Major. In addition to developing your speed and accuracy, this exercise will help you link major and minor chord shapes, create more interesting melodic phrases while soloing, and connect your fretboard.
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‍Day 2. The Tongue Twister

The best practice exercises often impose restrictions to develop one aspect of your playing without getting distracted. This one-string exercise will help you develop your fretting-hand dexterity and “string comfortability”. Isolating your fretboard like this will force you to explore how much melodic information you can get out of one string.

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‍Day 3. The Staircase

This arpeggio-based exercise incorporates two chords that are common in R&B and jazz. On a technical level, this exercise will help you build speed, hone your alternate picking skills, and synchronize your picking and fretting hands. On a musical level, this exercise will help you navigate transitions between arpeggios and chord formations while adding color to your chordal playing.

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Day 4. Baby Steps

Today, you'll learn how to start approaching chord shapes with a guitar-solo mentality by breaking up chords through staccato arpeggiation. In his experience as a professional touring guitarist, Justus has found that most artists just want to hear simple stuff that sounds great. This exercise is an effective way to develop a wider melodic vocabulary without having to learn ultra-advanced theory.

Day 5. The Crab

Get comfortable traversing up one string in a musically-interesting way and increase your fretting-hand speed. This exercise is simple on the surface but gets difficult as you change starting positions.

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Day 6. Twinkle

Work on maxing out your alternate-picking speed while maintaining steady tempo and dynamics. As a side accomplishment, you’ll be well on your way to playing AC/DC’s Thunderstruck after mastering this exercise!

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Day 7. The Butterfly

Develop the muscles in your picking hand with this beautiful fingerstyle exercise. The Butterfly exercise is inherently musical. In fact, you could create a whole song using it as a launching point!