Why Is Doing THIS With A Metronome SO HARD?
Try this: set your metronome at 50 bpm (beats-per-minute for the people who, and try clapping together with it in time. Be Precise!
Can you really nail these clicks, or are you a bit off?
Pro tip: if you are clapping exactly at the right time, then you will hear just the clapping, and the metronome clicks "disappears".
If you’re anything like most musicians, you probably have a little bit of trouble in doing that certain tempos.
When you go below around 50 bpm, or above around 200, the clicks can become very difficult to follow - even when you are playing actual music with other people rather than clapping all by yourself like a weirdo.
Indeed, even some professional struggle quite a lot with tempos like these. Drummers, for instance, know that the ballads are the hardest songs to play because they are so slow... (The ballads, not the drummers. Well, the drummers too, but I'm talking about the ballads)
If you have this issue - and again, most people do - what can you do about that?
Easy. All you need to do is no playing at tempos below 50 bpm, or above 200 bpm, ever Simple as that!
(I got this wonderful piece of advice from my dad who was a physical therapist: "Dad, if I do this, it hurts" "Then don't do it". Thanks dad!)
You see, in life, it’s often best to simply ignore your problems instead of fixing them. It’s much easier! Just say no to all song slower than 50 or faster than 200.
(Honestly, the above is still better life advice than 99.7% of what social media "life coaches" tell you. I know because I am a guitar teacher. You're welcome!)
That being said, if you’re one of those increasingly rare people that likes to actually put work into solving your problems - and , you know, actually become better - then you might need to take a slightly different approach.
What you need to do is start using subdivisions intelligently to make extreme tempos easier to play.
If you want to learn how to do this, watch the short and sweet video linked below and I’ll show you what you need to do:
Want to expand your knowledge of chords and harmony on the guitar? Check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course if you want to be an expert on chords!
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you! I have a great question about how to play with a metronome in strange conditions. The hardest part about this lesson is syncing to a metronome at 40 BPM LOL. I cannot time it right and land on the beat.
I put it to 50 and it was much easier. Very good. Yes. You see, that's the thing. People always assume that when the metronome goes faster, things go harder. And when the metronome is lower, things are easier.
But in reality, it's quite the opposite. Indeed, if you ask any practicing musician, you'll notice that they will tell you that the fast piece is easy and is easy to play. It's easy to keep time, it's easy to groove with it, and it's the ballad, the slow piece that is super hard to play because when you dilate the time so much, it's much harder to be exactly on the beat and to follow the beat.
So what can we do? Let me start with this immediately. If you set your metronome at 40, this is too slow for most people to reliably follow without being trained before. So, let's set our metronome at 40 and let's hear how fast that is.
That's really slow. If I had to play in time... Oops. It's quite hard to follow simply because between one beat and the other, there is a literal eternity in between and you get lost. When is the beat going to come?
Now, this was a bit easier in the past with the mechanical metronomes because you could see the thing moving from one side to the other, the arm moving, and you could tell, okay, we're nearly there. Time to play.
But with the electronic metronomes or with the phone metronome, okay, we had a little bit of drama here before shooting this video because we couldn't find a physical metronome in the studio. We just started to use a phone like everybody does today.
Okay. Okay. See? But with that, I mean... you look at the phone all the time, it's quite hard to tell when the next beat comes. So what do we do? Here's the thing. When the rhythm is too slow, think it faster.
When it's too fast, think it slower. What do I mean? Let's set this metronome at 80 instead. Exactly twice the speed, right? Let's hear it. Now 80 is much easier to play, okay? It's not super fast and the time between two beats is not an eternity, okay?
You can totally feel it. Good. Now what you do is simply play every other beat. That's much easier than before. You see, I'm hitting it every single time because the extra beat helps me correct and predict when the next one will arrive.
Much easier, okay? Now, of course. We could also multiply the whole tempo by 3 or by 4, okay, we can put 160, okay? I mean, if 8 is typically great, but if it's still too slow for you, let's put the metronome at 160, okay?
And then you play every 4. How is this gonna sound? One. One. So. Great! So, for the purpose of the exercise that we were talking about in the other video, just put the metronome at 80 and play every other beat, or at 160 and play every 4 beat, whatever you prefer, okay?
There's no problem. Now, if you are instead playing in a band and the drummers start with a super slow tempo, then you will have to learn to subdivide this tempo in your mind and think about an 80 when the 40 is playing.
So, and we have a 40 again. So, you start feeling it this way. It may take a couple of beats or bars just to get the hang of it. But you're feeling it too, you see? I go one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one.
Okay, so you start feeling it as if there was another beat in between and it becomes much easier to follow, okay? It's kind of a mental trick. You need to train it, but once you get it, slow tempos become much, much easier to you.
Of course, you can use the exact opposite trick when the tempo is too fast. Suppose you have a piece, I don't know, at 190, okay? There are not many pieces at 190, but sometimes your drummer is doing like a metal drummer. Okay and you're like I have to play a lot of notes no you don't have to play a lot of notes okay you can just think of it you're rather than counting like one two three four count one one one one.
So you feel not all the beat but you put the feeling on your own some of those beats okay you put the emphasis on your own some of those beats thank you okay so and becomes much easier to manage. This is great especially when the drummer goes with a double bass double double kick drum and put lots of notes and then hits in in a short amount of time and it goes everything goes super fast you don't have to play at the same speed you have to play the same tempo.
But you don't have to play the same amount of notes, okay, you can play less notes And by the way, it also sounds better if you don't play all those notes all the time. Okay, so you feel the rhythm slower.
So again, when it's too slow, feel it faster fill up the beat with an extra beat so you can Feel it at a normal tempo for you. When it's too fast, feel it slower Don't feel all the beat, feel only every beat or every three or every four beats so that it's more manageable to you.
Okay, it's a psychological trick, but it works and because the range of human feeling on the rhythm is not that wide, okay, everything slower than 50 -ish It's hard to follow as rhythm if you don't subdivide it and everything faster than 220 -ish, it's hard to follow as rhythm if you don't eliminate some beat and start feeling only some, only every other beat or every other every other four beat, okay That's a normal limitation of us humans.
That's what we feel as rhythm of our range so we try to get back into that range by adding by adding beats that are not there or by taking away beats that are there so we can feel the right thing Okay, try this trick and let me know how it works for you. This is Tomasso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com, and until next time, enjoy.