Words of Warning to Newbies!

[raylinds]

I never had trouble keeping time with the classic rock and blues I have been playing for years, but now that I am getting really serious about jazz, I decided to do things right and start using a metronome. I have been practicing a few tunes for a few months and they sounded pretty good. I figured once I had the notes down, I would start using a metronome. Big mistake! The other day I started to play the same tunes to a metronome and just could not do it! No matter how much I slowed down the bad habits of improper timing I had developed were killing me and I felt like I had taken three steps forward and was now five steps back.

The problem was especially apparent with notes that are held longer a long rests- I would tend to rush and not hold for the full time required. Also, mixing quarte eighth and triplet notes in unusual groupings were a big problem. It's been four days, and I am finally making progress at very slow speeds and am less frustrated, but I feel like I would have been much better off if I used the metronome from the start. They say if you want to learn to play golf start with lessons as bad habits are harder to break once they become ingrained- it's the same principal, here. Please learn from my mistake!

If anyone has some good exercises for learning to play with a metronome, please share them.

[jazzshrink]

...If anyone has some good exercises for learning to play with a metronome, please share them.

There are nearly 60 threads on metronomes here. Some address the very question you posed.

[enalnitram]

I was in Portland, Oregon a few weeks ago. Travelling means making the rounds to all the shops! I have two metronomes: a wind-up wooden one and a cheapo 9v with an electronic chirp. I'd like to get an electric with a more robust "click". At one guitar store, I asked about metronomes. The owner said "congrats" and that in 10 years of running the store, no one had ever asked him for one!

One good way to use it is to set the click to give you "2" and "4".

[raylinds]

There are nearly 60 threads on metronomes here. Some address the very question you posed.

Thanks- I'll do a search.

[Hep To The Jive]

I never had trouble keeping time with the classic rock and blues I have been playing for years.

And that's what unfortunately many people who play guitar think... If you did you would not have a problem with the metronome now. It doesn't matter what you play, blues or classic rock or jazz, the metronome doesn't lie.

It must be something about how you approach the instrument, your touch, your overall technique, your hands! When long ago I was found out by another guitarist who told me look, you just all over the place, you can't play to the metronome, you suck, I had to re-learn the whole thing. I started really paying attention how my hands work. Thankfully, it didn't take long, but I had to do it.

That's my take on it anyway. I just don't believe you can be good in keeping a solid time in one genre, but totally lost in another. Return to the rudiments!

[DawgBone]

And that's what unfortunately many people who play guitar think... If you did you would not have a problem with the metronome now. It doesn't matter what you play, blues or classic rock or jazz, the metronome doesn't lie.

These were my thoughts as well. And if it's a swing issue then his blues were also deficient since swing is a core component of blues and pretty much any modern type of music that doesn't suck to a lesser degree.

[emanresu]

Classic rock, you say. Try switching from classical guitar, omg.
But it's just swing, it takes a lot of time to settle. I think using a simple 2&4 on mertonome is not enough to get it well.
You could try this for all sorts of tricks, exercises and create drum loops even: Ultra Max Turbo Metronome Plus 2000

[raylinds]

Everyone seems to think it's an issue with swing- it's not! I can play a mean shuffle rhythm- I have more of a problem with straight rhythms.

In the end it doesn't matter as I need to learn to play with a metronome, period.

[Mick-7]

Pat Metheny harps on this with his students. I posted an MP3 in a thread here of a lesson with one of his students in which he chastises him for his "sloppy" timing.

P.S. - That Pat Metheny lesson is here [my post #74]: The Pat Metheny Interview (by Rick Beato)

[Spook410]

If you learn songs using something like iRealPro you'll be forced to keep time.

[teeps]

If you have a tablet or a smartphone you may be able to use that as a Metronome with a proper app. I also use the drum patterns in my looper pedal or make a pattern loop on my drum machine on the PC. I would find a mechanical Metronome a bit hipster.

[pamosmusic]

One good way to use it is to set the click to give you "2" and "4".

I don’t love 2 and 4, but this brings up an interesting point.

A lot of people improve a bit when they start using a metronome and then hit another wall quick. Thats because when we start using the metronome, we usually use it to give the time when we want to be using our own time and just have the metronome there to check it.

Thats why this probably won’t help at all:

If you learn songs using something like iRealPro you'll be forced to keep time.

Time tends to bend and flow and people play some of it and leave some of it, so if you just practice with iReal, you’ll sound alright with iReal but lose your place immediately when you’re playing with a recording or other human beings.

So starting with the metronome clicking out quarter notes and doing different rhythm values is great, but then reducing the amount of metronome you hear is the super important next step … so having it click on 1 and 3, 2 and 4, just 1, maybe even just 2 or 3 or 4. Playing eighths or quarters or quarter triplets or your licks or tunes against that will start really building your own sense of time.

(Do I do this myself? Every day. Am I good at it? ……. cough ….. umm……)

[Bobby Timmons]

Everyone seems to think it's an issue with swing- it's not! I can play a mean shuffle rhythm- I have more of a problem with straight rhythms.

In the end it doesn't matter as I need to learn to play with a metronome, period.

So the issue is being able to have an expressive time feel while keeping the tempo the same.

Some people have the experience to have a nice musical time feel, which involves flexibility - pushing and pulling for effect, but aren't able to do it within a regimented tempo.

You have to re build this up. Play the tune to the metronome and don't worry about any expression. Just practice it as straight (lame) as possible until you can execute it perfectly like that. Then add the expressive flexibility / time feel back in.

To make it easier on yourself, blend in drum genius, or without anything. It breaks up the challenge and frustration and cross trains you a bit.

[pauln]

Anyone ever plug their electronic metronome into the amp channel with reverb and turn up the reverb a bit, then play your guitar through the non-reverb channel?
The time precision diffusion caused by the reverb may sound more natural and also more "forgiving" of small errors. This shifts the negativity of counting errors to the positivity of gradually eliminating the reverb from the metronome channel - each step closer to better time feel, progressively reduce the reverb a little.

[raylinds]

So the issue is being able to have an expressive time feel while keeping the tempo the same.

Some people have the experience to have a nice musical time feel, which involves flexibility - pushing and pulling for effect, but aren't able to do it within a regimented tempo.

You have to re build this up. Play the tune to the metronome and don't worry about any expression. Just practice it as straight (lame) as possible until you can execute it perfectly like that. Then add the expressive flexibility / time feel back in.

To make it easier on yourself, blend in drum genius, or without anything. It breaks up the challenge and frustration and cross trains you a bit.

You hit the nail on the head. The two tunes I am really having trouble with are Blue Bossa and All Blues. Both tunes have a lot of space to play with the timing, which I was doing before using the metronome. But I am a firm believer in having to know the rules before you can break them, so I agree I need to be able to play it straight.

[pamosmusic]

You have to re build this up. Play the tune to the metronome and don't worry about any expression. Just practice it as straight (lame) as possible until you can execute it perfectly like that. Then add the expressive flexibility / time feel back in.

I guess the question is "what is expressive flexible time-feel?"

It's hard to add that back in without a conception of what that means, right?

[Bobby Timmons]

^ Generally I think it means pushing or pulling for effect while having an understandable relation to the strict tempo. You do this by having a logical placement of the phrase correlated with the effect you want to create. Including the start and end, and flow of the notes along the way. Pushing sounds exciting, pulling sounds relaxed, right on it can sound tight at up tempos or serious for slow tempos.

Couple vids of guys who I think use a crazy amount of flexibility while it not sounding shoddy. It sounds good because of the relationship to the tempo and the logical use of flexibility in the phrases.

Interesting on this one is that Stevie rushes with his playing for excitement, but the drummer is way behind the beat for a relaxed feel. Sounds extremely unique.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

I am a firm believer in having to know the rules before you can break them, so I agree I need to be able to play it straight.

You have to be able to feel the beat to know where you are in relation to it. This isn’t a “rule”, it’s a simple fact. If you don’t know where the beat is, you can’t intentionally lead or lag behind it. Art Tatum was a master at wandering among the beats until you’re sure he’s totally lost. But if you count through his improvisations, you’ll find that he comes back to the beat perfectly at the end of every excursion. Good drummers do this very well too, while not-so-good drummers come out of solos either entirely off the beat or on the wrong one.

Listen to Percy Heath’s bass solo on D Natural Blues from The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery for a wonderful example of this. Near the end of his solo, there’s a 2 bar segment (in bars 9 and 10 IIRC) in which I was sure he missed a beat when I first got the record. This was in 1961 when I was in high school and didn’t understand what he was doing. So I counted the beat while listening to this passage again and again until I could do the same thing he did.

You can use an online or electronic metronome to evaluate and improve your sense of timing. Set it to a tempo, start counting the beat out loud, mute the sound for 10 seconds, then unmute it and see how close you are to the beat after counting it on your own for a while. If you’re way off, practice doing this for a few seconds and gradually increase the muted gap as your sense of time improves. Keep extending the muted gap until you can stay in tempo and in time through several minutes. This is especially important if you want to play solo or accompany vocalists or soloists by yourself.

This is a rhythmic analogy to the pitch effect of vibrato. Many singers use vibrato (intentionally or not) to “encompass” the intended note either because they can’t sustain a pure note perfectly on pitch without it or they don’t hear / feel / know the right pitch. But those whose pitch control and awareness are excellent use vibrato purely as an expressive tool. Listen to Nancy Wilson and Samara Joy to appreciate great pitch control and artful use of vibrato. Paul Desmond and Art Pepper were instrumentalists with the same abilities. Sadly, insensitive recording engineers sometimes use electronic “correction” to minimize or remove this artful use of time and pitch variation.

These aren’t rules, they’re tools - if you don’t have them or don’t know how to use them, your playing will lack excitement and be less interesting than it could be. Creatively working within the rhythmic framework of a tune and hitting exactly the notes you want to hit are integral to the mastery of our craft of making music. These are not concepts or guidelines - they’re physical functions like hearing, tasting, and balancing.

[raylinds]

You have to be able to feel the beat to know where you are in relation to it. This isn’t a “rule”, it’s a simple fact. If you don’t know where the beat is, you can’t intentionally lead or lag behind it. Art Tatum was a master at wandering among the beats until you’re sure he’s totally lost. But if you count through his improvisations, you’ll find that he comes back to the beat perfectly at the end of every excursion. Good drummers do this very well too, while not-so-good drummers come out of solos either entirely off the beat or on the wrong one.

Listen to Percy Heath’s bass solo on D Natural Blues from The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery for a wonderful example of this. Near the end of his solo, there’s a 2 bar segment (in bars 9 and 10 IIRC) in which I was sure he missed a beat when I first got the record. This was in 1961 when I was in high school and didn’t understand what he was doing. So I counted the beat while listening to this passage again and again until I could do the same thing he did.

You can use an online or electronic metronome to evaluate and improve your sense of timing. Set it to a tempo, start counting the beat out loud, mute the sound for 10 seconds, then unmute it and see how close you are to the beat after counting it on your own for a while. If you’re way off, practice doing this for a few seconds and gradually increase the muted gap as your sense of time improves. Keep extending the muted gap until you can stay in tempo and in time through several minutes. This is especially important if you want to play solo or accompany vocalists or soloists by yourself.

This is a rhythmic analogy to the pitch effect of vibrato. Many singers use vibrato (intentionally or not) to “encompass” the intended note either because they can’t sustain a pure note perfectly on pitch without it or they don’t hear / feel / know the right pitch. But those whose pitch control and awareness are excellent use vibrato purely as an expressive tool. Listen to Nancy Wilson and Samara Joy to appreciate great pitch control and artful use of vibrato. Paul Desmond and Art Pepper were instrumentalists with the same abilities. Sadly, insensitive recording engineers sometimes use electronic “correction” to minimize or remove this artful use of time and pitch variation.

These aren’t rules, they’re tools - if you don’t have them or don’t know how to use them, your playing will lack excitement and be less interesting than it could be. Creatively working within the rhythmic framework of a tune and hitting exactly the notes you want to hit are integral to the mastery of our craft of making music. These are not concepts or guidelines - they’re physical functions like hearing, tasting, and balancing.

Excellent post- thanks for taking the time to provide such a lengthy explanation.

[pauln]

...These are not concepts or guidelines - they’re physical functions like hearing, tasting, and balancing.

Exactly, I say "rhythm is a given", the most fundamental dimension of the foundation of music.

[ccroft]

Nevershoulda nailed it. You have to know exactly where the beat is to come back to it. Like playing quarter note triplets. Or resting or holding over the beat. Or how string quartets stay perfectly synced while they stretch time together. You have to develop the feel so you're not thinking about it.

A friend told me that exercise of muting the nome and seeing where you land was something he did in class at Mannes. I think he said it was part of passing a test, so they all worked on it.

I think reading helps too. You're trying to play something that might not be natural to you and you have to stay with the beat for it to sound right.

(I started reading music when I was about 9, so of course my time is impeccable :-)

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

You have to know exactly where the beat is to come back to it. Like playing quarter note triplets. Or resting or holding over the beat. Or how string quartets stay perfectly synced while they stretch time together. You have to develop the feel so you're not thinking about it.

Eexactly! Here's a short illustrative clip from my trio's Thursday night show this week. We love spontaneous group improvisation and often throw it in for a chorus or two. Here's 90 seconds from Tenderly in 3, with some 4 against 3 that came out of nowhere and returned in the next go-'round. You can hear us playing fast and loose with the beat in several places, yet nobody gets lost and the rhythm play comes off pretty well. It takes an attentive ear, a good sense of where the beat is, and the ability to keep the time and meter in your head while you're playing against or outside one or both. I'm lucky to work with a drummer and a bass player who enjoy doing this and can do it well.

[Spook410]

Thats why this probably won’t help at all:




Time tends to bend and flow and people play some of it and leave some of it, so if you just practice with iReal, you’ll sound alright with iReal but lose your place immediately when you’re playing with a recording or other human beings.

Hasn't been my experience at all. iRealPro is just another tool to learn the song, practice the melody, figure out what you would like to play on the tune. You learn the song or you don't. Tool just happens to include an electro-drummer so forces you to keep time. Even if it is overly rigid.

Electronic tools don't teach the nuance of playing with others but nothing but playing with others teaches that. And since a large percentage (over 80%?) jazz guitar forumites don't ever play jazz with a live drummer and/or bass anyway and many never play with others at all, mp3 backing tracks and iRealPro are about as close as you're going to get. So maybe the gold standard is learning to sound good with backing tracks and not the more rare and infrequent playing with others.

[pauln]

You may play with others at home alone if you stream jazz recordings and play along. Select a decade and try to hang with them as best you can; it's good learning and fun.

https://www.accuradio.com/jazz/

[Christian Miller]

I never had trouble keeping time with the classic rock and blues I have been playing for years, but now that I am getting really serious about jazz, I decided to do things right and start using a metronome. I have been practicing a few tunes for a few months and they sounded pretty good. I figured once I had the notes down, I would start using a metronome. Big mistake! The other day I started to play the same tunes to a metronome and just could not do it! No matter how much I slowed down the bad habits of improper timing I had developed were killing me and I felt like I had taken three steps forward and was now five steps back.

The problem was especially apparent with notes that are held longer a long rests- I would tend to rush and not hold for the full time required. Also, mixing quarte eighth and triplet notes in unusual groupings were a big problem. It's been four days, and I am finally making progress at very slow speeds and am less frustrated, but I feel like I would have been much better off if I used the metronome from the start. They say if you want to learn to play golf start with lessons as bad habits are harder to break once they become ingrained- it's the same principal, here. Please learn from my mistake!

If anyone has some good exercises for learning to play with a metronome, please share them.

The metronome can’t give you good time but it can tell you what you are doing wrong… if you use it right. So well done.

For developing time one good exercise is simply to speak the beat ‘1 2 3 4’ through everything you play. Sounds easy, but try it.


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