Just some light reading for the weekend

I’ve been trying to come up with a simple yet hard exercise to challenge myself. I didn’t want some overly-complex arpeggio or crazy gymnastic lick, but rather something that would normally seem so archaically easy that I could just pick up the guitar for a few minutes and work on it. The idea was to do this many times throughout a weekend instead of sitting down and working on it for an hour straight.

As I was working through some lesson material it dawned on me that one of the biggest “problems” I hear among guitar players – well, musicians in general, really – is that their timing sucks. Always behind or ahead of the beat, and 99.9% of the time not because they are playing with the pocket. I’m a victim of this sometimes as well, though I tend to play directly on top of the beat; almost too metronomically (is that a word?) for my own taste.

And so it dawned on me how I could test myself on how good my timing is, and it’s deceptively difficult. So what better way to make myself feel better than to try and torture all of my fellow Fretheads!

Ready, Set, Doh!

So here it is. First, you’ll need a metronome. If you don’t have one you can use the one on the Online Guitar Tools page.

What you’re going to do is pick something that you already have down pat. This can be a scale, an arpeggio, or a gymnastic exercise. It doesn’t matter what the specific tool is, but you have to make sure that you have it down pat so you don’t have to think about technique or fingerings. The point is to not be distracted by outside parameters.

Once you have that figured out, put the metronome on a ridiculously slow pulse – 53 beats per minute or lower. Listen to the pulse for about 30 seconds to try and get it into your ear (into your soul, really) and then start playing along with it in quarter notes; in other words, one note of your chosen exercise per beat of the metronome.

Pay particular attention to not only striking the note at the exact same time as the metronome’s pulse, but also holding the note for the entire beat. Quite often we shorten the note’s value in order to try and get to the next note on time. But, that is not the right way to play. Each note deserves its correct value.

If you think you have that down, decrease the tempo even lower. If that still doesn’t present much of a challenge for you, then play 8th note triplets for each pulse. Meaning, three evenly-spaced notes in between each beat of the metronome.

If you can do that with no problem, I applaud you greatly! You have definitely put in the dirt time and should be very proud of yourself.

As I mentioned earlier, this isn’t something to work on for an hour straight. Just pick up the guitar for 5 minutes several times a day throughout the weekend and give it a shot. I think many of us (yes, us) will be surprised at how bad we really are at it. But, it’s absolutely something worth working on.

If you give it a try – and I sincerely hope you will – please do us a favor and comment on your results. It will be very interesting to see how everyone made out.

Good luck!