How do one learn to play fast songs? Need some advice~

[goldenmaster]

Lately my speed has been increasing quite a bit even though I haven't even been trying specifically to work on speed! Guess i'm just lucky, haha. Well, i've been practicing a lot lately. And i'm not playing any music that is specifically "fast" but the "amor dios" tremolo piece by barrios certainly requires fast picking. I think working on tremolo is a good "oblique strategy" for increasing speed.

The things i've done lately that seem to help the most with my speed, though, are....

Playing arpeggio studies. The melodic kind, not like Giuliani arpeggios. I play diatonic seventh chords on all the scale degrees in the full range of a 2 octave scale in the same position (sometimes moving up or down one fret). When I started doing this regularly it increased the fluency of my right hand quite a bit and made scales feel much smoother.

Staccato practice.

Thinking of moving my fingers in "chunks" as scott tenant advises. Feeling groups of two or three fingers instead of one at a time.

AMI scales have helped my right hand a lot too. I feel like it really evens out my right hand to do a lot of AMI scale practice. I also play my scales with repeated notes... play each note one, two, three, and four times.

I can't say what exactly helped with my speed because I was never thinking about it specifically. But I think, like everyone is saying, focusing on evenness and precision, without specifically thinking so much about speed, makes a big difference.

[Jstanley01]

I start out playing slowly at first, and then as I get to know a piece better, I learn to play it faster. Works for me.

[KennethG]

I'd agree with Stanley; start out slow at first and get the positions, fingerings and movements mastered. Then start speeding it up. For me what happens is any problems I have in technique appear and/or get worse at faster speeds, so I'll start by playing a piece slowly until I'm consistent, then start speeding up. Any problem areas that appear at faster speeds are practiced until they're smooth before trying to play faster.

The thing you want to avoid is trying to play a new piece too fast from the outset. I've had to unlearn plenty of bad habits that playing too fast created. First learn the piece at a slow, accurate pace, then speed it up as you get used to how to play it.