As a guitarist trying to establish your sense of rhythm, playing with a metronome is extremely important. By practicing with a metronome you can gain a true sense of your rhythmic and timing weakness and identify areas of improvement.
Playing with backing tracks and drummers is another way to enhance your timing, but often the other elements of the music can hide your mistakes. Personally, I’ve noticed an incredible improvement in my own timing, as well as my students’ timing, by spending as little as 15 minutes a day with a metronome. I often practice with a metronome before performing as it syncs my brain to feel perfect timing.
Now that you know the reasons for playing with a metronome, it’s important to understand how to use a metronome properly. Today, there are many smartphone metronome apps you can download. I personally like the paid version of Pro Metronome because of it every advanced feature you would ever need as well as multiple tones for the accent beat.
When picking a metronome it’s important to get one with multiple tones for the accent beat as your brain & ears can go deaf to some tones more easily than others. Pro Metronome has a cash register sound that I really like because it’s present and your ear tends to not go deaf to it.
Regarding rhythm, it’s very important to feel straight 1/8 notes, swung 1/8 notes and triplets. So I recommend practicing riffs & exercises that incorporate these straight beats for practice warm-up. I recommend a tempo of 100 BPM when starting. BPM = Beats Per Minute. This is the unit of measure for tempo or the speed of the music. Essentially, if you counted 100 even pulsed within 1 minute, you’d have 100 BPM.
When improvising, it’s important to understand the rhythmic groove of the song and feel the straight 1/8 note, triplet or whatever rhythm it’s emphasizing. Each beat is the potential trigger point of a note that could be potentially held for longer than the 1/8 note. When you can sync yourself to straight and steady pules it makes playing in-time much easier.
Once you warm up with straight pulses, try playing through an entire tune in-time with the metronome. When we discuss the pentatonic scale in a later article, we’ll also discuss the importance of odd groups of 1/8 notes, such as 3, 5, 7 or 9 even beat phrases that ascend or descend the scale to get the most out of it and add a sense of angular odd-beat rhythm. You can implement these in 4/4 timing by treating the last beat as a tied note. With a metronome, just set it to 3/8, 5/8, 7/8 or 9/8 time signature to practice odd 1/8 note group riffs and phrases. 6/8, 10/8, 14/8 and 18/8 would also work even though they are even numbers because you could treat it like two groups of 3,5,7 or 9 note phrases in a row. Once your comfortable feeling straight triplet and 1/8 note rhythms, simply know that 1/16 notes and 1/16 note triplets are just a perfect double of that speed.
When syncing yourself with the metronome, turn the phone around so you don’t see the light indicators. You need to hear and count the even beats not using visual cues, plus the lights on a phone often induce latency making it impossible to sync yourself in-time visually. You need to know & feel that 1/8 notes are even 2 beats per quarter note and count them like this… For example, If you were in 6/4 at 100BPM, you’d count (“1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 5, 2, 6, 2”) for example. You also need to know that triplets are even 3 beats per quarter note. For example, If you were in 4/4 at 100BPM, you’d count (“1, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3”)
At Boston Guitarist we practice our scales in multiple ways using metronomes that emphasize specific intervals. Doing so kills a few birds with 1 stone because we begin to intimately understand our fundamental intervals and scale shapes while playing extended ascending and descending phrases on-time.
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