How to Practise With a Metronome

When you’re working on developing your guitar skills and starting to push yourself to the next level, a metronome can be an invaluable asset to your practise routine.

The job of a metronome is to provide you with a constant pulse at whatever tempo you set it to. This can be used a way to help yourself speed up an exercise or technique, or it can be used to help you work on your overall sense of timing and rhythm. Think of it in the same way you’d think of a drummer. It’s going to provide you with that solid beat to lock into.

Many musicians, drummers especially, will choose to record to a metronome in the studio. You may also hear this referred to as a “click”. Recording this way allows things to be easily changed, copied and manipulated but it also provides a solid guide for all the other instruments recording on top.

How to Practise with a Metronome

Using the Metronome Speed

Firstly, whatever you are practising, you need to establish a comfortable level of speed. If you’re working on a lick or exercise, work out the tempo at which you can comfortably play this. Most metronomes have a function called tap tempo which allows you to tap the speed you’re playing at to get a guide speed.

When using a metronome, I find it’s best to work in 5 or 10bpm markers, so if you’re able to play something at 118bpm comfortably, round it up to 120.

The reason for this is that the difference between 1 and 2bpm is not noticeable, but 5 or 10bpm is a noticeable change.

To get things faster, you should perfect the exercise at your base tempo, and always remember what this tempo is. Once you can play the lick or exercise cleanly and consistently at this tempo, move up 5-10bpm and repeat. By this point you should start to feel like you’re moving a little faster but you should master it pretty quick.

Keep going in 5-10bpm movements until you reach a point where you cannot complete the exercise, this is your ceiling, however this may be lower than your target tempo. The next practise session, start at the base tempo again, and work up in 5-10bpm groups as you did the previous session.

You may once again hit your tempo ceiling and no longer be able to push past it. Each session reset to your base tempo and keep working up, eventually you will break through the tempo ceiling and be another step closer to your target bpm.

You can apply this principle to working on finger exercises, speed exercises, chord changes, licks and anything else that you need to either speed up or tighten up.

What to Play

The great thing with a metronome is that you can split up what you play to suit your needs at that point. Many players will start out playing a single note or chord per beat of the metronome, and this is fine. This is a simple way to measure both timing and speed because what you play should directly link with the metronomes click.

You can go further and imagine the metronome as being a steady quarter note beat, and inside of that beat you can experiment with different rhythmic subdivisions such as eighth notes (2 per click), triplets (3 per click) or sixteenth notes (4 per click). Working with different sub-divisions is great for building your rhythmic awareness with playing guitar.

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About the Author

This article on how to practise with a metronome was written by Leigh Fuge. Leigh is a professional guitarist and content creator and also works alongside musicteacher.com to create guitar focused, educational and entertainment content.

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