I do want to become a fast guitar player but I’m taking my slow time, not rushing myself. I can play moderately quick, but I’m not yet a speed demon like Yngwie Malmsteen or Michael Angelo Batio, but I certainly would love to get there someday. You don’t want to rush playing fast guitar, and a lot of guitar players make the mistake of trying to play fast right away. I was guilty of that.
Steve Vai said through plenty of guitar magazines that the secret to playing fast, is starting off real slow. Play every note perfectly and cleanly, then build up speed a little. Always playing with a metronome. That sounded like a good idea, so I’ve been doing that a lot recently. Start off slow on the metronome, and go up a little bit each time. I don’t think I’ll ever be a speed demon, but I do want to play a little faster.
Because if I want to play kick ass rock n’ roll with a hard edge, that requires technical skill and a good ear. I’m trying to get good at both. I don’t want to be stuck playing power chords and easy chords, all the time. I want to expand my talent a little bit. Get into the more advanced level of guitar playing. To create bad ass rock n’ roll riffs, that requires theory and scale knowledge. I’ve been studying a lot of theory stuff too and that is also helpful.
I’m not rushing to be a guitar genius but that is my dream to get there and doing all I can.
Kev
K'Brocking 
I feel your pain dude. One thing that’s helped me a lot in the last year or so is to do some kind of unorthodox rudiments.
Basically, if you’re familiar with the basic scale rudiments in books like Rock Discipline… y’know, 1-2-4, 4-2-1, 1-4-2-4, etc. etc…. what I do is play them in the upper register using only my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th fingers. You can do pretty much any variation you can with rudiments… groups of three, groups of four, groups of six… even five and seven crossing strings. Whatever. Mix it up. It’s hard as hell at first but it’s helped me a ton… especially trying to play it legato. Ouch.
That, and instead of doing chromatics, which are pretty effective, I take the Rusty Cooley approach and do big stretches diatonically. Then I mix it up… ascending, descending, just about any variation of the four notes I can think of that’s totally awkward. I remember reading long ago Steve Vai saying that if you want to get good, you have to spend the most time practicing the stuff that’s really hard.
I’ll probably make a Youtube vid of all this stuff before too long, but hopefully the description isn’t too vague. \m/