Modern metal guitar playing is a marathon, not a sprint - having world-class technique is worthless if you can't keep up the pace
Playing metal is fun but can be tough on your hands too. Mastering songs, then, extends beyond just technical ability. You may be able to perform each section and technique, but piecing it all together can become one hell of an endurance test. It’s important to build the endurance of your guitar playing.
Having a low level of stamina can be frustrating. It stops you from achieving the things you want – or can do, just not for long.
Fortunately, a little patience and some tactful exercises can help you rapidly achieve night and day results.
We've listed some exercises and hacks below, and every week we post new endurance exercises for MMA members. They're simple enough to master in five minutes, and doing them regularly can help supersize your shred muscles.
Mindless legato
One thing that has always helped me has been to take the concentration element away from the guitar. Growing up, my family computer took 3-5 working days to load a webpage. So, while trawling through Ultimate Guitar with my trusty Squier Strat on my lap I had nothing else to do to pass the time than to play.
Often, I’d sit there and mindlessly look at the screen while it slowly – torturously so – loaded a tab up, playing simple exercises with my fretting hand. Sometimes I’d pick the notes, but usually, I’d rely solely on legato. I soon found that doing this allowed me to generate more volume from my notes. The more I did it, the stronger the notes became, and the more consistent they were between my fingers.
In an age of light-speed internet – fiber optic, FTW – this can be translated to mindlessly playing in front of the TV. Netflix and shred, if you will. By occupying my brain and attention elsewhere, it stopped the exercise from becoming a bore – it was an afterthought, but one that reaped plenty of rewards. Building endurance takes time and a lot of repetition which can be extremely mind-numbing. So, by entertaining yourself elsewhere, your hands can do the hard graft without being bored to tears.
Trills are especially useful. They engage your forearm muscles, which does a lot of the heavy lifting. Try changing speed throughout, and alternating finger combinations, which creates a similar exercise to one of our warm-up hacks, to ensure no finger is left behind.
It's also worthwhile moving to different points on the fretboard and on different strings. This changes up the angle that your arm is coming in at, which therefore engages different muscles. It gives you more comprehensive results.
The aim is not to create something particularly musical. You don’t even need to plug your guitar in. The most important thing is doing and building up stamina in your fretting arm.
Do it for a little while and you’ll start to feel the burn. Please don’t overdo it, but see the burn as a positive sign. Progress is being made. Just don’t wreck yourself, we can’t afford the lawsuit.
Attack, attack, attack
I promise this isn’t a shameless plug for my old band, but we had a proggy thrash tune called Drones that was a real litmus test of my endurance. Its main riff bounced between the open fret and the first fret in a sharp pattern in 7/4. The speed and ferocity of the song, especially towards the end, proved to be a picking hand killer.
It felt that if I could survive that, I could survive anything. Dance of Eternity, come at me, bro.
Therefore, finding songs with a more relentless pace and getting to grips with them, can help your body get used to that kind of workout. Take it slowly and gradually.
It can be valuable to view playing the guitar as another form of exercise. If you’ve never run long distances before, you couldn’t smash out a marathon without training, so you shouldn’t expect similar jumps on your beloved electric.
Start by getting the song down at a much slower tempo, ensuring consistency in the picked notes, and all the little details aren’t blindly skipped over, before ramping up the speed. Endurance isn’t just about playing at science-defying speeds; it’s about doing so with clarity and precision.
The magic, I found, was that the emphasis here is on my picking hand, not the fretting hand. There was no legato to give my picking hand a break; every note is picked and it’s a great way to test how strong your picking hand is. That's why I recommend sticking to two frets so you don't have to put any thought into your picking hand.
Chill out, maaaan
When we try to play something challenging, it's easy to tense our muscles. But this works against us. Tensing our muscles sees them tire quickly, nailing the part gets a lot harder, and playing can become a painful endeavour.
When tensed, we often grip the neck extra tightly which can also cause fatigue. Conversely, it can slow you down too. There’s a real mind-over-matter element to guitar endurance. Typically, I find fast, intense passages aren’t as fast and intense as I first feared; something which caused me to tense up in the first place.
By relaxing your muscles, taking a deep breath, and trying to mentally make the riff your b*tch, you’ll find the task a whole lot easier. And you won’t hurt yourself in the process.
Time, the evaluator
A lot of endurance-building comes with time. Sticking with the long-distance running analogy, you may have built endurance to run a fast 5km a few times a week after a while, but a brief period away from doing so and you’ll find your stamina has dropped. It’s better to play guitar for an hour a day than seven hours every Sunday. It’s about regularity more so than brute strength.
Setting goals helps you track your progress. Seeing a clear progression when things get laborious helps keep you on course rather than getting distracted and moving on to the next thing.
So, if there’s a crazy sweep picking pattern at 210bpm you want to nail to show off to your crush or make your mates think you’re Hendrix reincarnate, set a realistic timeframe to get there.
Speed is pointless if it isn’t executed smoothly, so start slowly – perhaps at half speed – and nail it at that speed first. With these exercises, I only speed up after I’ve nailed it 10 times in a row, without any fluffs. You may want to set your own rules, but having them in place ensures you walk before you can run.
Again, playing regularly in short bursts is best, so try to put time aside to work on that pattern for, say 20 minutes a day, and only increase the tempo when playing at the current speed becomes fairly effortless. Move on too quickly and, while you may get to the required speed, your playing might prove sloppy. At the start of each session, start a few paces behind where you are up to. This ensures that you are still playing it properly and helps you warm up before tackling the next tempo.
By doing mindless exercises while your eyes and brain are preoccupied, relaxing your muscles, and taking the time to get to the destinations you crave, you’ll find building your guitar-playing stamina isn’t all that difficult. But it’s something that many players overlook, or don't give themselves the patience for.
Don’t be that guy. Be an Arnie of shred.
The MMA one-year anniversary giveaway
To celebrate one whole year of Modern Metal Academy, we've launched a free-to-enter giveaway with a raft of prizes up for grabs. That includes Browne's signature Schecter Tao guitar, an Antelope Audio Zen Quadro USB interface, Baby Audio plugins, strings, MMA merch, and plenty more.
Head on over here to learn more and to enter.
Comments