When you watch somebody play quick on the guitar do you ever wonder if you could study to do that? Lets take a moment to look at what resources we need to increase our personal guitar playing speed on a regular basis. The most important asset in this venture is a metronome, which can be bought from a music shop, stolen from a loving aunt or downloaded from the net. If you choose to steal one, then I am afraid you will not make much progress in your quest to play guitar fast because short cuts just do not work. Most of us look for the fastest and most painless way to do things, and that is why most of us are not playing guitar at the speed of light.
All right, you now have acquired the metronome and you are ready to start. Now you want something by which you can do your practice sessions and these could include a part of a song, which has a solo segment, an exercise like a series of arpeggios or a picking exercise. Here you want to be careful in the selection of your material since you want to be sure about your speed of playing, and set the metronome accordingly. Spending time to learn the piece is really not necessary as when you know the piece, you can start to growth your speed of playing gradually. When you are familiar it means that the finger, hand and arm muscles ought to work smoothly so that you do not halter anywhere along the way.

Thus this is the crucial thing that you want and to play the guitar fast play it slowly first. The exercise you have chosen to play should not be too easy, but at the same time it should not have too many tricky bits. That is why it makes sense to pick out an exercise to practice rather than a song or a piece which has a prolonged solo segment.
Now you are beginning to see the way forward, if you have your practice passage ready, check it with your metronome and make sure you know what your present speed is. Then take the metronome to a level, which is not very high, and aim to reach that level. Note that this is something that you want to do without: muscle tensity. When you study to play guitar fast, any muscular tension would definitely come in the way. To avoid any stress and tension, just forget the time you are taking to reach the metronome setting. The idea is not to actually play the guitar quicker at sometime in the future, but to work a little bit on playing fast every day.
Thus when you select a pre-decided passage to speed up your playing, and practice it regularly without failing any day, you would notice that your playing speed is improving by leaps and bounds. Once you have reached a level of skill on one exercise, choose another one with a couple more challenges. The critical issue is again to record your present level and then set a goal for reaching.
