Arts & Entertainment, Music

Technique: Developing Speed

Lesson time 09:01 min

Tom believes that you have to play slowly to learn to play fast. Learn the finger exercises he used to go from scribbling around on the guitar to confidently shredding.

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Topics include: Play Slow and Perfectly to Play Fast • Crank Up the Speed

Tom Morello

Teaches Electric Guitar

In 26 lessons, Grammy-winning musician Tom Morello will teach you the guitar techniques, rhythms, and riffs that define his signature style.

Preview

I've never heard of a soul who was naturally good at technique on the guitar. There are other abilities that may be intrinsic or that you can unlock with practice. That was the case with me. It took years and years and thousands of hours of practice to sort of unlock creative spirit on the guitar before I was finally able to break through. But without the relentless practice routine, I never would have got there. [MUSIC PLAYING] In the technique portion of my practice day, I spent the time exclusively doing mind-numbingly boring exercises that would allow my fingers to move around the neck in different ways when called upon to do so by inspiration and jamming later on. What set me on the path to these particular exercises that I'm going to show you, was I-- for a while I was taking guitar lessons at a small guitar shop in Highland Park, learning the occasional Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath song from the nice stoner teacher. But then one day he was sick. He was out sick. So I got to go the other room with a different guitar player. And he said, play something for me. So I went in there, and I went-- [PLAYING GUITAR] I was like trying to impress him with my shredding. And he's like, you want to play fast, right? I'm like, well, yeah, obviously. He's like, well, you're going about it all the wrong way. And let me help you out with that. So it happened to be a guy whose name is Michael Angelo, who is a-- one of the fastest guitar players on earth, who played in a band-- Nitro-- for a while, and is most famous for, like, playing guitar with four necks. And he plays them with, like, equal facility upside-- like a-- like a concert piano. It's pretty crazy. And he's super metal. And he was my teacher. He didn't have the accouterments on at that place, but he demonstrated in front of my face just how one could play at blazingly-- blazing speeds. And so I paid heed to what he told me. And what he told me was very surprising. He said in order to play fast and get command of the instrument, you must play super slow and in time. So he wrote out a little page of simple exercises that I've practiced thousands of hours, that allowed me to, you know-- eventually, I was, you know-- [PLAYING GUITAR] And how I got near that was by doing this. What he said was you set the metronome-- the first exercise that he showed me was this. Very simply, you're using your fourth, second, and third finger. You're going to do these little triplets on the highest two strings-- the E and B strings. [PLAYING GUITAR] Nothing more than that. And so you set the tempo to one in which you can play it absolutely perfectly 100 times in a row. So let's see if I got-- we'll start with, like, a 50 beats per minute. [SOUND OF METRONOME] [PLAYING GUITAR] Once you've done that, you just move the whole thing up one fret. [PLAYING GUITAR] You've done that 100 times-- one more for fret. [PLAYING GUITAR] And on-- onward up the n...

About the Instructor

Tom Morello is a two-time Grammy winner and one of Rolling Stone’s "greatest guitarists of all time." In his first online guitar class, the co-founder of Rage Against the Machine will teach you the riffs, rhythms, and solos that launched his career and sent his music to the top of the charts. Tom will share his approach to making music that challenges the status quo and teach you how to create your own musical style.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Tom Morello

In 26 lessons, Grammy-winning musician Tom Morello will teach you the guitar techniques, rhythms, and riffs that define his signature style.

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