2mo ago

Rhythm issue

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?

9 comments

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.

"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"

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.

9 comments