Your New Friend: The Metronome!

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!

1 Like

Justin is definitely right, doing the exercise and keeping in time at 60 bpm is much more difficult than 80, 100 and 120.
Michael

3 Likes

Love the videos. How do we set up your app to accent on beat 1?

1 Like

Click BEATS down the bottom and select 4/4 and it’ll accent beat 1 differently to the other 3 bars!

1 Like

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!

2 Likes

@Himawari

Disappearing metronome trick is awesome when you get it!!!

1 Like

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.

1 Like

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

3 Likes

Hey welcome to the forum!

Have you tried recoding yourself?

That’s always an eye opener!

1 Like

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

1 Like

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

2 Likes

You know how they call metronome?
Humblifier.
Keep at it. It’s one of the best tools for musicians.

5 Likes

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…

4 Likes

That looks amazing! Another thing I didn’t know that I needed :grin:
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 :slight_smile:

1 Like

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

1 Like