Another question as I like to know why I am practicing something. Justin notes for scale practice.
Why when you get to 120bpm cut back to 60 and do two notes. Isn’t that the same as 120bpm?
8th note are 2 notes per beat. So the bpm would be 60 and you be playing 120 note in the same length of time.
Also when you get up to 120 bpm thats 240 notes. That’s pretty fast for bpm and really hard to tap your foot to
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Yes, except now you only get a click every 2nd note. This allows you to get used to 8th note picking.
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OK. But why are eight notes important in terms of scales.
Just tried this a 50bpm and failed miserably! My brain can’t compute listening to the clicks and counting 1,2 to get my fingers to respond.
8th notes are important to rhythm, don’t count 1 2 count 1 and for 8th notes. The and goes in between the clicks. Click and Click and or 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. The clicks are always on the beat.
If you can’t keep up you’re not ready for 8th note scales. Stick to 1/4 notes for now until you can hit 120 1/4 notes comfortably.
That makes it easier!
I’ll slow it down until I can get it.
Been thinking about this. If 8th notes are important to rhythm why are they important to scales and therefore, in this case, improvisation? Why not just 1/4 notes faster, counting 1 and, 2 and, etc?
1/4 notes means 1 note for every beat in 4/4 timing. 8th notes mean 2 notes for every beat in 4/4 timing. 16th notes means 4 notes for every beat in 4/4 timing.
So if you just play 1/4 notes faster you’re speading up the bpm. Just like strumming improv has to stay within the rhythm.
If your going to practice 8th notes with your scales you should start with alternate picking, down on the beat up on the and. Something you should have learnt in grade 1.
Stuart, have a look at this Develop the Lead Guitar Timing of The Greats
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So if you are playing 1/4 notes at 120bpm, your fingers are still moving at 120bpm for 1/8 notes with the metronome at 60bpm and 1/16 notes with the metronome at 30bpm.
Yes but 30bpm with 16th note is not the same as 1/4 note at 120.
60 bpm is 60 beats per minute has nothing to do with how many notes you play in that minute. You can mix 1/4, 8th and 16th notes together in the same 60 bpm. Think of a guitar playing fast but still keeping in time with the drummer. The drummer doesn’t speed up the tempo just because the guitar player play more notes. He keeps the bmp the same.
Don’t confuse bpm for notes per minute.
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Thanks for the reply. This is another one to add to my growing list of things I don’t understand about this guitar playing malarky! 
Did you not do the lesson on strumming to bpm? 1 down strum on each beat then 1 down strum then an upstrum inbetween the beats. This is the some thing.
Good to see you’ve not lost your sense of humour!
Not quite. With strumming your fingers are doing a lot less. With scales your are picking the strings with your right hand and fingering the notes with your left, and coordinating both. I guess that at the moment I don’t know the scale well enough.
This is actually the reason!
Rhythm is extremely important in lead playing - you get a lot of milage out of phrases by messing around with rhythm as well as intensity… without necessarily changing the notes.
For this reason, you don’t want your brain to “change tempo” within a song or solo. You’ll always keep your internal (or external) metronome set to a fixed tempo, and almost certainly will you be thinking in quarter notes.
You’ll then learn to hear and play various sub-divisions within this “grid” of 1/4 notes. Could be 8th notes, 16th notes, but also triplets and more. But, again, always keeping that steady quarter note click going in your head. Switching smoothly and accurately between sub-divisions over a metronome click is a skill in itself, and not as easy as it may sound
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Interestingly, Kasper, you don’t mention foot tapping. Do you tap or is it just the internal rhythm?
Either way, do you stick to the 1/4 internal ‘clicks’ or taps at faster tempos or switch to 1 and 3, or maybe just 1 ?
Those are some really good questions!
I do sometimes tap my foot - but by now mostly when I’m trying to play something with a very complicated rhythm. Licks or riffs with note groups that repeats in odd ways, like the solo to Final Countdown for example where the fast riff is a repeating pattern of essentially three 16th notes played 5 times (plus a final “connecting” 16th note) over a single bar. Stuff like that can be really difficult to “feel”. But for most of my playing, I’ve been doing this for soo long and practiced it soo much that it’s become something I don’t think about. Playing live, and standing up, I guess I use my whole body to really feel the beat.
In the band setting I’m probably the guy after the drummer with the best feel for rhythm and timing, so all of this practice has been super useful for me and made it much quicker to pick up new songs and solos.
I tend to naturally play after a RDAP (Rhythmic Dependent Alternate Picking) method, where my hand is constantly moving to a certain “grid” tempo… and the note placement in the bar decides whether they are played as an up or down stroke. A powerful method IMO.
The last question is hard for me to answer… I’m not sure what I do. For some types of playing I definitely mostly pay attention to the 1 beat, but for some stuff - especially lead playing - I think I’m thinking in 1/4 “clicks”.
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Thank you.
I know you have a lot of experience whereas I’m at the other end of the scale.
It’s always interesting to know how others go about things.
I’ve never heard of RDAP but a quick search shows it’s a thing and also the ‘grid’ that you talk about.
I understand what you mean by not sure what you do.
Sometimes when I’m trying to up the tempo and the foot is going like seven bells, I find myself tapping on 1 and 3 and I’m not sure when it happened!
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Something that helped me figure out how to play, for example scales, to a metronome with two notes per beat, was accenting the 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc note with extra dynamics. Like the C Major scale would be like…
C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C
etc. The same goes for quarter notes, accenting the fourth note with harder picking.
I was also confused about this at first until I noticed that I started doing this automatically when trying to do so. Now that I consciously do it, it’s easier.
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Spot on Ryan!….except for your terminology.
Quarter (1/4) notes are one note per beat.
When you play two notes per beat, as in your example, you are playing eighth (1/8) notes.
When you play four notes per beat, you are playing sixteenth (1/16) notes.
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