I cannot play on time. Not in terms of missing beats, or losing the click in the middle of a song, but in that my timing is almost always off. I compared my played notes to the click in the DAW, and I’m usually rushing, sometimes by 30-40ms. I remember Adam Neely said once that 10ms is barely acceptable, so yeah.
I tried dividing the distance between clicks in my head, doubling the metronome tempo, moving with the beat, consciously conpensating for the rush, nothing helped. Therefore, my questions - how’s your timing doing? What can I do to improve mine?
Start slow, metronome at 65bpm. Put your pick on a string and play open string arpeggios, down-up-down-up with the click. Each time, reset your pick on the next string before plucking through. Aim for consistent tone quality and volume.
When you’re satisfied, move up to 75bpm and repeat, moving up in tempo over time. If you make a mistake, restart. If you make two mistakes, back up and do it slower again.
Speed is not the goal. Tone and timing are the goals, training your pick hand to relax and your mind and body to feel the beat.
Once you get to around 90 bpm, go back down to 65 and start playing eighth notes. Follow the steps from above.
This should take you a week or more to complete. Then go up into higher tempos. Every mistake, roll back 5bpm
You can also try various arpeggios patterns and string combinations.
Good luck!
Why 65 bpm specifically? Why not start with 100-120 and go down in tempo, I think it woukd be easier this way
Because you want ample time to set your pick. Because it’s harder than your way. At such low speeds it takes much more focus and your wrist and hand will be dying to play faster when you can actually relax. (this is a tense exercise at this speed!)
Speed isn’t your friend. If you can’t do it slow then you can’t do it fast. Is it boring as hell? Yep. Do you want to be make progress and be better at your instrument? Then just do it for a few minutes. My teacher says quit any exercise after five minutes if I really can’t stomach it. The key is coming back to it again tomorrow and the next day, not mastering it in one sitting.
This specific exercise will also train your hand for even tone and pick pressure.
This is how bluegrass guitar and mandolin players train from the beginning.
Alright, thank you
This, but then after you can do this solidly start halving the click tempo while still playing at the same speed so you get 1 click per 2 beats, bar, 2 bars, 4 bars etc.
Benny Greb (well regarded German drummer with a lot of instructional content) has a free metronome app for this purpose called Gap click that may be helpful, he argues for this as an essential exercise in developing your internal sense of time.
Oh I’m getting that app
Chase the sound you are looking for. That’s pretty much my generic advise for any music related question. Being aware of what you want to change is 90% percent of the battle. The rest is changing technique, gear, etc. subtly or drastically to get there. This may be enough for the problem to naturally fix itself.
More specifically, I find that it is all about feeling the music with your whole self. “No shit”, you say. Stay with me for a second and I will get to what I mean. I’m primarily a drummer, so you’ll have to adapt my advise to guitar. When I am playing something a little more chill and I want to play behind the beat, I lean back (so I am further away) just a bit. If I have time in between beats, I make exaggerated, almost showy, movements that don’t let me come in early. The trick is to keep the flow regardless of whether I’m hitting the drum that beat or not. Perhaps you have to fix your posture and keep your pick hand moving bigger movements. When the big movements aren’t practical, picture it in your mind instead. If you have an entrance, start the movements a few beats early.
When I want to play on the beat or ahead of it, I lean forward and pump myself up mentally. With the change in posture and mindset, I am a totally different person. Part of it could be that being just a bit closer means I hit a few milliseconds earlier with the same motions, though I think it is more mental. The trick here is that my body is relaxed either way and I keep the fluid motions.
Back to my thesis: I bet you are focusing too hard on the technical aspect of what you are playing and not feeling the vibe the song is supposed to have. I think of it as the difference between reading the lines in a script versus becoming the character. You have to feel the emotions you are trying to express with the guitar.
Also, make sure your whole body stays relaxed. I can’t stress that enough. Try turning your brain off, connecting visually with band mates or listeners, try to see the forest instead of just the tree in front of you, and smell some roses. Just really feel the song.
Forgive me for all the metaphors. I hope this helps.
I get what you’re saying, but there’s no song in question. Otherwise, good stuff, thank you
Might be worth checking the latency and error compensation settings in your DAW. Try a loop pedal or get a friend to critic your playing. Shouldn’t blame our tools but in this case could be your playing fine but the DAW is out?
I thought about it, but the inconsistency on display betrays sloppy timing anyway
“10ms is barely acceptable” 🤣 I’m sorry, but that’s the funniest thing I’ve read so far today. Do you realize how little of the music you hear on a daily basis meets that criteria?
Sure, not that relevant to my question though
Let me put it a different way: your premise was that a level of precision with less than 10ms of variance is necessary. I’m saying that much of the library of recorded music demonstrates that this is not the case.
If your premise is simply, “I’d like to be more precise with my timing,” then by all means. It sounds like you’re already doing the right thing though: lots of practice with a click track. There’s not really a shortcut to forcing your synapses to fire with that level of precision, you just have to keep doing it.
There’s an old joke about someone in New York asking for directions… “How do you get to the Met?” “Practice”
Get some sticks and a practice pad if you don’t have access to a drum kit and learn some rudiments.
Bare in mind that you don’t always need to be playing exactly on the beat and that notes in between the main ones are often pushed or pulled a little depending on what the song needs. Looking at a computer screen isn’t that helpful to me, how does it sound?
It sounds like half a dozen newborn deer on the pavement trying to walk
Better than three sneakers in a dryer, right?
Better. Because it’s faster
We must be fundamentally different kinds of guitar players. Timing? Metronome? 10 millisecond delay? Why are you trying to perfectly copy someone else’s music when you could be arranging your own novel collections of frequencies? Why formalize your art or restrain playful acts of spontanious whimsy.
When I play the timing comes from what feels right and sounds good.
Each practice session my goal is to discover a new chord or a new way to piece the strumming and harmonic frequencies together in a way that I never have before, sometimes intentionally breaking rhythm speed just to experience a drastic shift or see how it affects the mood.
Fuck time signatures and fuck musical notation, creative musical types are better off staying far away from them lest their imagination becomes caged by formality and law.
If I go to the teacher and ask to teach me how to improvise, I would not feel I got my money’s worth if they tell me “just play whatever you want”. I’d like to know what I’m doing with the guitar, and studying music theory is the easiest way to go about that. You need to get yourself inside the box before you can get out of it.
10ms thing is the consequence of me trying to make the stuff I play sound good. Right now, this is not the case for me, and I feel my sloppy rhythm is a contributing factor.
why should we practice anything or attempt to be more technically competent at all? have you considered that OP wants their own playing to be more on-beat? It’s a part of general musicianship. It’s one thing to choose to play-off beat for an effect, but it’s another thing to not be able to play on beat when you want to.
by all means you do you, but honestly shut the fuck up with musical notation being detrimental to creativity. Arrogant dunning-kruger bullshit.
I used to think like that and it only caged my ability to get better at functionally playing and understating music for the majority of my playing life.
I wish I’d sought out lessons and theory years ago because in the last two years or so it has exploded my playing so much recently started a band.
Theory helps. Getting better at rhythm helps. What doesn’t help is being closed minded to avenues of improvement.
All that to say, though, don’t get too hung up on one thing at a time. Keep playing music you love and you’ll improve. Also, PLAY WITH OTHER PEOPLE! Or a backing track if that’s not possible for whatever reason. Your timing and musicianship will improve.
from context it sounds like you agree with me. did you reply to the wrong person?
Nope. Totally agree. Reinforcing what you said to the comment above yours.
II33535&°33
Music at its core is a physics mechanism, so it has to follow a system of rules just like heat or gravity. What you are saying is comparable to “if you forget the rules of gravity you will be able to fly” which is plain wrong.
If you want to fly you work hard to learn how, otherwhise you’re just a monkey beating on a typewriter
