Do the exercise you’ll learn in this lesson for a week, and you’ll notice a huge improvement in your strumming skills. The full lesson is here!
Justin is definitely right, doing the exercise and keeping in time at 60 bpm is much more difficult than 80, 100 and 120.
Michael
Love the videos. How do we set up your app to accent on beat 1?
Click BEATS down the bottom and select 4/4 and it’ll accent beat 1 differently to the other 3 bars!
Been doing this for a few days now and I’ve already noticed some problems. Firstly, wow, I’m so inconsistent with hitting the strings. Sometimes I’m getting all 6 and at others I’m only hitting 4 or 5. 60 bpm is mostly definitely the hardest by I waver in and out at all the tempos. This is great practice, though, and it’s clearly something I should have started doing a long time ago!
I did the exercise for one month, 5 minutes everyday…but, even if I perceived myself as enough focused and relaxed at the same time, I wasn’t able to be so accurate to make the click disappear (maybe once for a few seconds!) Nevermind, I hope the exercise did me well nevertheless and I’m going to try again once in a while.
Been working in SOS program, really going back to basics. When I play by myself — acoustic - I play cover songs that sound OK
Working on SOS with metronome and struggling, as I realize sometimes what I think sounds OK is off. I may make chord change on a 3!
I realize I also add random strums, but not sure why even though sounds fine
Fascinating
Frustrating
Great classes
Hey welcome to the forum!
Have you tried recoding yourself?
That’s always an eye opener!
I’ve never recorded with metronome, but just alone
I realize all the timing involved - strumming is and trying to sing.
With metronome at 50! I’m realizing where verse starts — on the 3 of a bar! Anne not just winging it
I plan on recording with metronome
Thanks for advice
In my early days with Justin’s courses and playing in general I really struggled when I tried to play along with a metronome. It sucked all the joy out of my learning so I didn’t worry about it for another six months or so. Next time I tried it, same thing, so I left it alone again.
Third time lucky charm. Now I use it fairly regularly and it helps me a lot. I gigged for a while with a friend performing as a duo and what was good during rehearsals was if either of us was unsure about the tempo, out came the metronome (app) and we played to that.
It’s a great tool.
I also use one of these: https://www.boss.info/au/products/dr-01s/
A bit more fun than a boring metronome app
You know how they call metronome?
Humblifier.
Keep at it. It’s one of the best tools for musicians.
Yep, the metronome is your friend.
It can be a annoying in the beginning, but the more you practice, the better it gets.
Especially if you’re going along with eight and sixteenth notes. Also, for other time signatures, like 4/5, a 7/8 for instance, the metronome is your friend.
You just need to get acquainted.
And as always, start very slow. The moment you got, let’s say, a 4/4 down at 40, you can move up at bit to 45. Pure downstrokes.
When that’s going well, ad upstrokes on the “and”. Increase speed as you progress and soon you’ll be playing in time.
But remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint…
That looks amazing! Another thing I didn’t know that I needed
I mean, not to replace the metronome, of course.
It took me a while to start using a metronome but I noticed an improvement once I did
It doesn’t stop being useful, either. Yesterday evening’s practice for me was almost all with the metronome - both humbling as it showed that there were measures of a fingerstyle piece that I thought I had down that I clearly didn’t - and gratifying as I got a different piece cleanly up to ~90% speed of where I want to play it - after time spent working on accuracy and note quality slowed to 60% speed