A look at why timekeeping is one of most important – but overlooked – skills to have as a guitarist
Picture the scene – your bus was due over an hour ago, it’s cold, it’s raining and you’re fed up. Every pair of headlights you see turning the corner up ahead isn’t your bus and it breaks your heart a little more each time. It’s frustrating. It shouldn’t be this way.
Timekeeping matters. In music, that’s no different. Here are our five main reasons why playing to a metronome can make you a far better guitar player.
Solidify your sense of rhythm
Like holding the pick properly and learning to mute the strings you aren’t playing, riffing against a metronome is a fundamental skill that should be developed early into your playing days.
It helps develop your internal rhythm and more easily indentify whether you are dragging or rushing a song. That means knowing if you play the one count of the next bar too early or too late. Like with anything in life, the more accustomed to tempos and metronomes you become, the more internalised your sense of tempo will be. It helps you tackle these niggling problems much easier.
It can also help you understand the feel of different tempos and their relationship with the music you love. Take Meshuggah’s Demiurge for instance. That riff hits hard, but its 84bpm tempo is crucial to its impact. If your sense of speed lacks grounding and you played it at 184bpm instead, the magic of the riff would be lost, the groove replaced by some faux thrash riff.
Knowing how to lock into a metronome keeps your playing consistent and tight, and will do wonders in how other people perceive your performances. Even if you are nailing your parts note-for-note, if the tempo is all over the place, it can damage the desired impact of your playing and make for an unsatisfying listening experience.
Slow down, egghead
Metronomes can help you nail a tricky riff the right way. If you dive head first into playing a complex idea at full speed, you may be able to pull it off, but chances are you’ve sacrificed certain techniques and principles to get there.
Using metronomes to nail a riff at a comfortable speed helps you master the core elements of the riff, like its picking patterns, fingering, and hand positioning. This gives you a foundation to speed up the riff over time. Patience is key.
Once you’ve got it down, your muscle memory can follow you along your speed-ramping journey. Bump up the tempo by 10bpm a time – or whatever feels a nice jump for you – and see how your technique remains consistent across all tempos and you are then able to play the riff fluently.
On the flip side, record yourself learning a riff at half speed and then going straight to full speed. Your playing will get sloppy to try and keep up with the pace. Here, nasty overtones and other blemishes will get in the way of the riff, especially in a high gain setting.
Strengthen weak points
Slowing down a part can also help identify where your technique needs improving. Perhaps it highlights that your fourth finger (pinky) isn’t strong enough to handle the riff at full pelt, or perhaps there’s a different way of fingering a tricky note to make things easier for you.
These are tiny details that make all the difference to a riff sounding either alright or awe-inspiring. If your brain is too focused on simply playing the riff because its speed is so challenging, those details will go unnoticed. Break it down, reanalyse and go again with fresh energy.
If it’s a case of pinky problems, that process identifies some groundwork you should put in before you return to the riff. Don’t run before you can walk.
Playing to a click
Just like dogs aren’t for Christmas, metronomes, of course, aren’t just for practice. Click tracks are a key part of recording music in the studio and for many live performances – bands like Tesseract, Monuments, and Meshuggah sound as great as they do live because they are always locked tightly into the nook of a click track.
If you’re not comfortable playing to a metronome or click and you enter a studio to record your new song, it probably won’t end well. Recording in studios can be nerve-wracking experience without additional pressures – red light syndrome is a real thing – so learn to make the click your bitch before you hit the studio, for your own sake.
Become a polymeter king
If you can’t play to one clear click, then polyrhythms will be unmanageable chaos. Here, two time signatures are played at once – hence the Latin prefix poly, meaning many. It requires a strong understanding of musical pulses to execute.
For instance, you might play a riff pattern in 7/4, and your drummer holds down the fort with a solid 4/4 beat. Being comfortable playing to a click will give you the confidence to focus on your pulse and not be put off by the other. Skills like that can help take your riff writing to new levels.
Want some more bite size tips to expand your knowledge and get inspired to pick up your guitar again? Head over to our blogs page for more tips, tricks, and tidbits.
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