How To Become A Better Guitarist Much Faster By Tracking Your Progress With A Metronome
by Tom Hess
Using a metronome to improve your guitar playing isn’t just about testing/improving your maximum playing speed. You become a better guitarist faster by using the metronome to track and improve your playing in many other areas.
Here are several areas of your guitar playing that can be tracked with a metronome:
Overall Consistency – A metronome is a great tool for helping you rest in between repeating practice items while improving consistency. You simply practice the item, then rest for four beats. Then track how many repetitions (out of 50 for example) were played perfectly.
Rhythmic Timing – Playing to a metronome challenges you to play in precise time. When you are playing perfectly, the beat seems to disappear under the notes you're playing. Tracking how many times you are able to do this (or how many times you are ahead of/behind the beat) helps you understand if you are weak or strong in this area.
Phrasing Creativity - It’s common to use basic rhythms such as eighth notes or sixteenth notes to improvise guitar phrases. This becomes boring when you do not add in variety. Practicing to the beat of a metronome helps with training to play in between beats and use more interesting note rhythms (when done correctly as mentioned in this guitar practice article). One way to track your progress in this area is to track how many different variations of an improvised note rhythm you were able to think of in 5 minutes.
Playing Endurance – Using a metronome helps you track how long you are able to play a specific practice item before getting tired. This helps you improve your stamina over time by adding more repetitions of an item per practice session.
There are many other ways to use a metronome to track your guitar playing progress and get better much faster.
Want to learn more about how to become a killer guitarist with creative metronome practice? Read this article about practicing guitar with a metronome and set yourself apart from all the other guitarists who only use it to track their speed.
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