Welcome to part 3 of this 4-part series on Metronome Secrets for Guitar. Over the course of these articles I’ll be covering lots of different and interesting ways to use the metronome to improve your time-keeping, groove and technique. This will be a nice intro for those new to this tool, and a nice refresher with some creative new ideas for those who are already metroprone.
Drop Out
A great technique to strengthen your feeling of the pulse is to drop Play or clap to the click – when you’re settled in mute it and keep clapping. After a while, fade the click back up again. Are you still in time with the click, did you stray from the pulse? Did you speed up or slow down?
If you’re going to try this, make sure you just silence the click, don’t stop it completely – it’s important that it keeps pulsing away silently so when you turn it up again it’s still in the same time as it was when you started!
It might be tough to simultaneously play and mute/unmute the click track, here are a couple of solutions:
- do the exercise with a friend, each of you taking turns to operate the click.
- program a computerised click track with pauses.
- tap your leg with one hand, operate the click with the other
- play a part that has some gaps!
- you can just stop playing your part for a few seconds to mute the click. If you keep feeling the pulse, you should be able to drop right back into the groove.
In this session’s video, I play a rhythm guitar part in the classic rock style. Listen closely and you’ll hear I’ve programmed the click to drop out at several points – it then fades back in again so I can make sure I’m still locked in. I heard of one drummer who used to leave minutes between clicks to test his internal pulse – that’s some hardcore dedication!
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