I was thinking about the movie Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon the other day. Wherein the protagonist of the movie states “Real speed.. comes without effort”. This is true of many things in life, but it struck me as an extremely appropriate quote on which to form the basis of this article.

If you want to play fast you need to learn to relax.

I’m serious. To be specific, this means your shoulder, elbow, wrist, fingers, and mind! A previous guitar teacher told me once that you could compare it to running a 100 metre sprint, stamping every footstep. I hadn’t realized just how guilty I was of this seemingly obvious fact until I read an article very similar to this one on another website.

I had hit a brick wall in my playing that no amount of metronoming could dismantle. I was noticing that my mucles would ache and throb after practicing, and I was becoming increasingly dissapointed with my lack of progress.

On reading the article I made a point of doing two things from that point onward.

1. Filming myself playing something I was having trouble with.
2. Freezing myself mid-lick to check how much I was tensing up.

If you have any tension in your muscles when you play, you can tell by looking at it. Which is why I used to film myself. Also if you stop concentrating on what you are playing and start concentrating on how you are playing it, any tension becomes immediately apparent to you.

There are plenty of ways you can ease tension whilst playing, some people just imagine calm things, some people visualize their arm relaxing, some people swear by massaging their arms on a regular basis. I’m sure you are capable of your own finding ways to relax. The important thing to stress here is the discovery of subconscious tension. If you know its there, you can do something about it.

As always the hardest thing to do is break the habit of tensing up! So good luck to you.

See you soon

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