Everyone wants to play fast.
Students grip the pick tighter, lean forward like sprinters, and launch into a flurry of notes… that immediately collapse into chaos.
Speed becomes noise. Control becomes tension. Music becomes a fistfight with the fretboard.
But kenjutsu and arnis alike, teach a different truth:
Speed isn’t something you chase.
Speed is something that happens when the movement is already smooth.
There’s a saying on the dojo floor that every guitarist should tattoo on their practice routine:
“Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”
For instance, when you swing a sword too quickly, you lose structure — the cut wobbles, the edge alignment breaks, and the strike becomes weak.
When you play guitar too quickly, without developing control first, the same thing happens — the hand collapses, the notes blur, and tension kills the tone and your stamina.
So here’s the path:
1. Start painfully slow.
Slow enough that your ego complains. You will notice it, trust me.
Slow enough that you can feel every micro-motion of the pick and every shift of the fretting hand.
2. Make the movement beautifully smooth.
No tension.
No rushing.
No fighting the instrument.
3. Add tempo the way you add weight in the gym.
A little more.
A little more.
A little more.
Never so much that the movement breaks.
Because patience isn’t just a virtue — it’s a speed booster.
In both swordsmanship and guitar:
Power comes from calm.
Speed comes from smoothness.
And smoothness only comes from going slow enough to truly learn the movement.
There’s also another adage that comes from Musashi’s teachings in the Gorin no Sho:
“Practice and combat are one.”
He meant that once you build control, you must then test the technique under conditions that resemble real battle.
Translated to guitar, that means there is another type of practice — exposure to speed — but that’s a topic for a different blog post altogether.
So for today:
Show up slow.
You’ll be fast tomorrow.
Cosmin