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Some songs are slow songs, others are fast. Still others are blazing. Guitarists, whatever their taste, naturally want to be able to execute any of them. It gives a wider range of musical choices and the chance to enjoy that rush that comes from zipping along the strings with perfect skill.

But, as the old saying goes, before you can run you have to learn to crawl. To make that crawling period as short as possible there are some basic techniques that can help you build speed.

Building speed is partly about executing patterns. You train your muscles, and they feed back information to your brain. That loop gets more and more efficient with practice.

But to really build speed, you need some way of keeping score. One way to do that is by playing scales in time with a metronome. Set on the lowest setting, you’ll develop the skill to play many scales in short order. Then, it’s time to crank it up a notch.

Repeat the exercise over several weeks or months. Depending on your natural pace, with the metronome speed increased at least once per week, you’ll get where you want to go. You can use a mechanical metronome or software, each has pros and cons.

Software is more easily adjustable, more flexible and has more options. But getting away from the computer for a while is a good thing. Staring at and listening to a physical metronome is more natural for some.

Having this kind of external timekeeper helps make your progress objective and easy to judge. The same goal could be accomplished with a purely visual indicator, like a clock, but it doesn’t have the same impact. Musicians are wired for sound.

But executing scales, or even intervals, at a fast pace is only half the goal. You want to be able to execute any series of notes or chords lightening quick before you can say you’ve mastered the guitar. That means learning to sight read or reproduce by ear.

Sight reading helps build your musicianship a number of ways, but it just doesn’t click for every one. Some really fine musicians in history didn’t have the knack, though most could read music.

For those who just can’t get it, ‘playing by ear’ is the next best thing. Sight reading requires analytical skill, not something every musician is up to. But playing by ear is simply a matter of hearing and reproducing.

Whichever technique you use, and it’s best to have both in your toolkit, the same principle with scales applies: start slow, then push yourself, using an external tracking mechanism to keep score.

If you can read ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ and play it, great. If you can hear it, then play it back, also good. But you’ll need to work up to that one way or the other.

One contemporary aid to that is the wide variety of software packages available to reproduce any note, scale, pattern or song selected. At the same time, it can keep score if you feed the software through a microphone on the computer. That helps provide you with an endless pattern of practice material and keeps tabs on how you’re progressing.

Compare your starting point, then monitor your progress no more than once per month. More often will make most people either anxious – because they ‘are not moving fast enough’ – or too cocky, because they’re moving ahead higher than average. Then look back over a year and see how much you’ve progressed. Reward yourself.