Well after a week working with the music speed changer I’ve worked from 50% speed with timing all over the place to a crisp tight 80% speed.
It actually sounds like I’m playing a blues lead. What magic is this?! 
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don’t forget to steal as may licks as you can
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Try focussing on rhythm guitar for a while.
Give the lead things a rest and work on your core; achieve a bit more brilliance on the basics.
It is no step back in your ambition, it is an honorful way to go from “ok rhythm” to “autopilot solid”
The core of a song is the steady flow that a listener expects.
It is better to play simpler stuff but in the rhythm than trying (and failing) to do complex stuff.
As soon as you are rolling on auto pilot and it is hard for you to fumble, replace some chord strums with very basic lead parts. You keep playing over drum backing track or something but make sure you still do the rhythm work while you are at it.
whether you hit chords or notes and you try phrasing, phrasing is nothing more than playing on and in between these hits.
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I think I know what @lewis2025 is talking about and I think you’re saying the same thing. Yes, great blues players have perfect timing. But they’re not always playing whole, quarter, eighth, 16th notes or triplets.
Often they’re adding the human feel to in-between notes while still being perfectly in time with the music on the quarters or bar. Some examples are swing and shuffle rhythms. What exactly is the time signature of a swing or shuffle? It’s not easy to interpret based purely on notation. There is a human feel to it. I can’t find the exact videos I’ve watched before, but a few people have analysed it and worked out it varies a lot between songs and players, and is not mathematically precise.
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I’d love to hear some magic over in #record-yourself-progress-performance:audio-video-of-you-playing Jason.
JK, I think this is what Keith Richard is getting at when he speaks about (my paraphrasing the quote) “It’s easy to rock, the hard part is the roll, baby”. The way in which he plays in the pocket created by Watts and Wyman is what makes the Stones special in their hey day.
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For me I just play to a metronome, and then gradually speed up til I’m at song BPM. I prefer to start with a metronome as it makes mistakes in the licks more obvious, if the licks sound good over a metronome they will sound good over a backing track 
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Hi Leon
Yes I think a metronome would be useful and I’m definitely finding slowing everything down and slowly building up the speed has been really helpful.
Here’s what I have done in the past.
- Learn to play the licks slowly, but confidently, so you needn’t think too much about them. Get them under your fingers, as they say. You should be able to count the time as you play the lick.
- Once you can play a lick without thinking about it, figure out what bpm you can play it at. You can do this with a metronome. Find the metronome speed that corresponds to the speed you already feel comfortable at. Make sure you play the lick in time with the metronome (you should count it out loud).
- Let’s say you find that you can play a lick at 60 bpm. Find a backing track at 60 bpm and then play the lick over it. Maybe you can play a handful of licks at 60 bpm. Mix them in, too.
- The next step is to increase the bpm of the backing track, say 65 or 70 bpm. And go on from there.
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