Advanced Metronome Practice THE PROPER WAY

[Music] so [Music] in this video i'm going to show you my favorite ways to practice with a metronome in order to improve our time feel now i'm going to show you these different ideas in order of difficulty so definitely make sure you stick around to the end because there's some pretty tricky but really cool ones so hi guys my name is robbie bronby nice to see you before we get started i just wanted to say if you've been enjoying the concepts i've been sharing or new to the channel make sure to subscribe and feel free to give the video a like because that really helps me out with that said let's get into it [Music] so as i mentioned before i'm going to show you how we should properly use the metronome to improve our time what i mean by this is that normally when we practice with a metronome we would have each click on each beat at the bar [Music] this is the regular way of using the metronome and it is allowing us to practice listening while we play but it's not improving our time feel because we're relying on the metronome to keep us in time as it's doing all the work and therefore we don't have the responsibility of keeping the time so the first thing which is common to do is silence two of the clicks so that we only have the sound on beat one and three we can do this by setting our metronome at half the value of the tempo we're playing there's actually an app on the phone called double time which does this at a click of a button as well [Music] this is starting to give us a little more responsibility for keeping the time but the issue now is that the clicks are on beat 1 and 3. the reason this is an issue is because this doesn't do a good job of representing the feel of what happens in jazz or swing music for this we're going to want to put the clicks on beat 2 and 4 or feel them on 2 and 4 instead this is because these are the beats which are accented within swing so this is now definitely getting us to improve our swing feel as well as the ability to listen while we play and there's definitely more responsibility on us however we can still fall into the trap of relying on the metronome to keep the time so here's the first way i like to properly practice my time field using the metronome we're only going to use one click bar and we can put this click on any beat we want to in fact it's good to practice in turn having the click on each different beat as we've been doing a swing feel let's keep the click on beat two but only be two for each bar [Music] do [Music] so as i mentioned before you should also experiment with having the click on the different beats 2 so just beat 4 or just beat 1 for example but if you want to really make it harder for yourself you should also practice having the one click of the bar fall on the upbeats instead we can again you know in turn practice having it on each different upbeat of the bar [Music] now the next level of difficulty for all this stuff is going to be to leave an extra bar of space so for example we could have the click fall on beat 2 again but this time only every two bars [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so [Music] so we're now really responsible for keeping the time and it's forcing us to develop this feeling of a rhythmic grid and we're going to need this in order not to get lost or not to lose the time we can do this practice with any kind of music or feel and not just swing i should mention that when we are placing the click on a chosen upbeat at the bar and playing music which is swung then we are actually feeling this upbeat on the third division of a triplet this is because the rhythmic grid of song music is felt in three and the eighth note or upbeat represents the third or last division of the triplet for music which has a straight feel the upbeat is dead in the center or played evenly between the beats because the grid is felt in four the reason i bring this up is because we can also place the click on any of the other divisions of the beat for example if we had swung music which is felt in three divisions then we could place the click on the second division instead this is really challenging stuff because unlike the downbeat or the third division which is just the swung eighth note this second division is not a common placement which we're used to feeling at all so you can imagine how good this is for practicing it and again you could do this for any kind of feel for music in a straight field you could place the click on any one of the four divisions or 16th notes and there's also no reason you couldn't put the click on a triplet division even if you're playing music which isn't swung now this would be seriously tricky but the more variations you try the better before we move on to the next level of how i like to practice with the metronome i wanted to say that we can do all of this stuff with any time signature as well what i actually like doing for odd time signatures is to get the metronome doing a clave or a specific rhythm there's another fantastic app called time guru which actually allows you to create a rhythm you want the click of the metronome to play but most importantly it has a random mute feature which is what's going to make us keep responsibility at the time and therefore practice our inner clock or time feel and sense of the rhythmic grid so if i wanted to practice in an odd time signature such as 7 4 then i would pick a clave a common one would be to feel the bar of 7 and split into a bar 4 and a bar 3 and have the click on beat 1 3 5 and the upbeat of 6. [Music] [Laughter] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] now adding the random mute feature [Music] so [Music] you can do this for any time signature or even any odd compound type signature because you can choose whatever rhythm you want the click to be i do recommend starting with the common claves so like for 5'4 you could do the take 5 clave for example let's now move on to the next level of difficulty what's really good to do is to feel the click in groupings which go against the time signature you're playing for example if we're playing in 4 4 we could have the metronome click every 3 beats or every 5 beats basically any odd number which doesn't line up with 4. this is now creating a polyrhythm or a separate tempo which crosses over the bar line and it will take a number of bars before the click resolves back to where it started in fact it will take three bars for the group of three and five bars for the group of five before it resolves this is great because you'll feel the click land on each beat within one cycle before resolving polyrhythms are something i love to do within my playing when improvising and this is definitely something i'm going to go deeper into for future videos but for now this is just a great way to start feeling across rhythm over what you're playing and you can have a lot of fun playing against it or going with this new pulse while still maintaining your sense of where you are in relation to the original 4 4 tempo so you know really advanced stuff but this is a great way to start practicing metric modulation and taking this idea further we can then double up the tempo of the click which will result in every other click being placed on an upbeat another way of thinking about it is by saying instead of having the metronome click in groupings of three or five quarter notes it will now click in groupings of three or five eighth notes which are still over our original four four tempo so for the grouping of three this is now giving us dotted quarter notes over 4 4 which is a very common polyrhythm this is actually one i love to practice over a blues because the click will resolve back to where it started um after the end of every 12 bar form because 3 goes into 12 4 times or because it takes 3 bars to resolve and that will happen four times within the 12 bar blues form [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] make sure to also try and start the form with the dotted quarter note beginning on the other beats so beat two three or four as well also remember you can do this for any time signature and even any feel if we were playing music which is in three divisions such as twelve eight we could have the metronome click after every four triplets now instead this would actually resolve after every bar so try having the click start on the four different possible divisions which allow the grouping to fall on different placements within the bar okay so the last one i wanted to show you which i love to practice again uses the idea of a polyrhythmic grouping of three against four but only on the upbeats this is actually a really tough one but it's fantastic for practicing your swing feel i think the easiest way for me to explain it is to say if we were in three four the click would land on the upbeat after three now this wouldn't be too hard in 3 4 because it resolves after every bar but this is a good way to visualize the grouping and how often the click falls so now when we take this grouping and change time signature to 4 4 the click placements are now on the upbeat 3 the upbeat 2 the upbeat of 1 and then the upbeat of 4 before resolving and because this is a grouping of 3 we know that it takes 3 bars to resolve and that the click will fall on each possible upbeat within one cycle [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] so as always thanks for watching this should give you guys a lot to play around with and go crazy over but the great thing about all this stuff is that you can include it while practicing other things for you know really efficient practice for example let's say if you were to use these metronome techniques while taking your drop voicing inversions or arpeggio shapes through the new tune you're learning which you're also taking through all the 12 keys i mean that would be like a full body workout for your musical brain because you'd be working on you know several things all at once so suddenly if you've only got 20 minutes to practice then you're going to be getting lots done also remember the slower the tempo or the less notes you fill up the grid with the harder it will be this will force you to focus more on your sense of the rhythmic grid playing at a fast tempo and filling it in with as many eighth notes as possible like some of my silly examples i mean that will actually start making us rely on our techniques to say in time as opposed to our inner clock and internal grid so do watch out for that if you like the video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel and if you want any of the notation for all this stuff or transcriptions of some of the examples i've played i'll be posting it all to my patreon page so you can check that out if you want to go deeper into these concepts links are in the description anyway huge thanks again and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Robbie Barnby

Views: 30,238

Rating: 4.9730897 out of 5

Keywords: robbie barnby, jazz guitar, jazz guitar lesson, scales, blues guitar, how to play guitar, music theory, jazz improvisation, es 335, arpeggios, music lessons, guitar lessons, harmony, rhythm, piano lessons, guitar exercises warmups patterns, learn guitar, how to improvise, jazz lesson videos, learn music theory, guitar technique, guitar solo, fast guitar licks, bebop, metronome, metronome exercises, time feel, swing feel, polyrhythms, gibson, odd time signatures, how to practice

Id: QTCojVV45xk

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021