“You have to play a little faster than you can actually play”: Bluegrass phenom Molly Tuttle shares the secret to playing lightning fast guitar
Molly Tuttle has a hack she used to help her play guitar faster, and it involves sounding a little bit messy at first.
Tuttle, who is due to release a new EP Into The Wild with her Golden Highway band this September, says her father encouraged her to play faster than her abilities to be able to gain more speed.
READ MORE: “I’ve never paid attention to my right-hand technique”: Molly Tuttle on her arresting playstyle, returning to her bluegrass roots, and her new live band
Although it might mean you sound rather sloppy at first, she says the trick worked and also allowed her to spot portions of a song which were causing her more difficulty. This also sped up the learning process, as she was able to slow down just the chunk she needed, rather than a whole song.
In an interview with Total Guitar for its new print issue, Tuttle shares, “My dad would say, ‘You have to play a little faster than you can actually play if you ever want to get faster’. He had so many students who would hit that plateau of like, ‘Oh, I’m afraid to play any faster than this’, and they would just never gain any speed.
“I think in a way he was experimenting with me and my brothers, like, ‘What if I have them play these pieces extremely fast – to where they sound super messy at first?’ It did work. We would practise something super, super fast to a metronome, and push it past our abilities.”
She continues, “That really helped us gain speed over time. I guess he had the idea of, ‘Well, if you are always practising slow, then you’re not going to ever practise things fast’. The only way to practise something fast is to practise it where you can’t actually play it very well. But it’s great to practise things slow, too.
“If there’s one little three- or four-note section that you can’t do up to speed, then play that tiny little section slowly, figure out what’s going on, and troubleshoot it, instead of just practising the entire thing. It’s important to be super effective with figuring out what’s actually holding you back.”
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Molly Tuttle (@mollytuttle)
You can pre-order Into The Wild now, or catch Molly Tuttle on tour this year.
The post “You have to play a little faster than you can actually play”: Bluegrass phenom Molly Tuttle shares the secret to playing lightning fast guitar appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
