Metronome Practice for Guitar

It's very, very important to switch up your metronome and explore all the different settings.

Whether you're playing quarter notes and you just try to match the click or you're playing eighth notes, it's going to be easiest to hear the click on all of the beats but playing on two and four is going to completely change the way you hear and express music.

Especially if you're interested in playing with a band, it's going to completely change the way you interact with your drummer and bass player because a lot of contemporary music really emphasizes the two and four and the groove that happens between the two and the four.

I use an app called Pro Metronome.

It's free and I love it!

If you get one like that, a feature that you have is, let's say you have it set to 4/4. It'll click on every beat and it'll light up and show you the beats in a line and then you can silence one.

You can start with silencing only the third beat so you're hearing:

One, two, - , four | One, two, - , four

So you can still hear the one to orient yourself but if you're playing like a major scale or something you're hearing:

click, click, - , click

You're just taking out one beat so that can help you get used to it.

The other thing that will really help with the two and four is to put the metronome on and without even playing anything, start to count along with it for a while.

Start with just the 2 and 4 and then try to fill those in.

And then start to really emphasize the:

one, two, three, four | one, two, three, four

So first start singing along to it or counting along to it and then tapping along to it or snapping along to it.

Practicing like that, with your body or with your voice, without even playing notes can help you get used to having the metronome on two and four and it not being as big of a deal.

Then one thing you could do is play a single note over that beat, next you can switch each note of the major scale each measure, then you can do two notes per scale degree.

The goal is to simplify it as much as you can, even just starting with picking one note without changing notes and maybe even before tackling scales.

When you have a task that's really challenging and hard and this happens with a metronome for everyone at some point, where you're just like, I don't get it, I keep speeding up, I don't like, this sucks, it's annoying!

Give yourself a time limit.

Be like, OK, I'm just going to play with the metronome for five minutes and I'm going to do my best to match the clicks with the metronome on two and four or with the metronome on the end of three or with the metronome on the 1/4 note triplet or whatever it is you're choosing.

Do a repetitive three - five minutes on one note and just focusing on the rhythm.

If you do that for like four or five days it's going to be a complete transformation.