Expanding The Possibilities Of Your Metronome Training
By Janus Buch
In my day to day work as a professional guitar teacher I frequently meet people who use the metronome in their guitar practise, but use it in a very limiting way. Most players mainly use the metronome to try to build their speed. I find that one of the main reasons for this is the addictive feeling of seeing the numbers rise on the metronome as you get better and better. This is absolutely fantastic, but we wanna understand why this is the case and use this momentum in other areas of your guitar playing as well. Reading this article and applying a little imagination to your practicing will get you a long way.
Why do people get trapped in the “building speed” part of their metronome practice.
Once people start working with a metronome in their guitarpractise, most people end up simply trying to play their exercises or scale runs faster. In my experience there are mainly two people. First of all its easy to measure progress this way, and seeing proof that you are improving is very addictive. Secondly they have never been exposed to other ways of using the metronome. A big portion of the students I encounter have also used the metronome for rhythm training as well, but beside from that.
The metronome is your best tracking tool
If you start thinking of the metronome as a tracking tool first and foremost you can begin thinking in ways, that will make a big difference in your development as a guitar player. Here is a couple of questions you might have a hard time answering. For example, how good are you at changing chords? Or how well do you know your scales? Or even better, how goo are you at playing the melody you hear in your head?
The answer to all of the above is this; you don’t know until you come up with a way of measuring it and then track it. And this is ultimately what will make you an awesome guitar player. You will use the metronome for tracking everything you wanna improve and in order to do this, you have to think of ways of practising, that you are actually able to track.
So, how many chord changes can you do in a minute? Set a metronome tempo and measure it. How many beats does it take you to find a specific scale or to change between them? Or when you have hummed three notes, how many beats does it take you to find them on the guitar?
These are only examples and as such, you need to take a principle away from this and not focus on the example. So the takeaway is this: With a little imagination you can track almost anything on the guitar and as you do it a lot, you will get better at it. This will make complex subjects really easy to practise and you will be able to see the your improvements in the same way, that you used to only measure speed progress with a metronome.
About the author: Janus Buch has been teaching guitar at a professional level since 2016 when he founded his first guitarschool. Since then he has moved his location and he is now offering Guitar undervisning i Horsens for Voksne from his Guitar school in Bredballe. If you are serious about improving your guitar playing or you want to reach your guitar playing goals once and for all, Bredballe Guitarskole is the one and only place to go.