Guitarspeed

Here is a program that is supposed to measure your playing speed and help you increase in speed. There's a free download of a demo version of it. It really looks interesting.

Anyone have any experience with it? Does it work?

http://www.guitarspeed.com/

Well I am downloading it... see what it does for me.

I got a chance to noodle around with the demo version. It only has a small portion of the program active, but it seems pretty cool.

Yeh... the number of options is very limited, but from the looks of the greyed out lessons and exercises, most of them you can do yourself with the use of a metronome. The secret to speed building I think is just doing simple exercises increasing the tempo each time you go through them, it's worked for me. I just need to find other exercises (perhaps more complicated ones?... scales have sort of been helping, so maybe more of them... and they will certainly help your speed too) that are gonna improve my consistency.

I'm debating on it. I hit the speed wall a few years ago, and not much that I do seems to help me to speed up.

There's a lot to do with efficiency... if you watch guys like Malmsteen and Michael Romeo you will imediately see the difference between their playing style and other guys. So I guess you could work on your efficiency of both your picking hands and your fretting hand. I have personally realised that my pick moves too much and have noticed speed increase when I pay attention to keeping my pick as close to the string that I'm trying to hit as possible... if I stop paying attention for a sec thou... the pick starts to move around a lot again... its just something that I've become used to that I'm trying to get rid of now.

By the way... this might sound kinda wierd but think about it. Don't try to play fast... don't think to play fast... just do... also playing by listeing is a big step to getting your speed up. I'm still a beginner and I'm still learning to play by ear, I'm sure that most of you guys are doing it that way but this realisation has helped me a lot.

Thanks, Atomic.Sheep.

I find that I do play much better when I don't have to think about it. It's getting to the point where it's automatic that's the struggle for me.