Guitar Noise

Timing is a critical part of making music. Without notes playing in their proper time, you have one enormously bad glob of harmony.

But timing is also important in practicing music, in the discipline of making music. For one thing, a metronome will improve your ability to play in time. Always play with a metronome. We think we know a tune until we turn on the metro, and reality hits as we stumble.

Beyond that, use a timer to time each exercise you do: scales, tunes, whatever. Deadlines have a way of motivating. If you know you only have 15 minutes to work on learning a riff, you’ll use that time effectively. This is true because you know if you run over that 15 minutes, you’ll be cutting into time for scales or something else important.

And another type of time to keep: a record, or log, showing how many days you’ve spent a particular song, or playing something else. For example, if your goal is to transpose all twenty songs in your repertoire to one other key, keep track of how many days it takes you to do that, using hashmarks on a piece of paper that faces you when you practice.

Then, when you’ve completed all transpositions, you might want to do another set of transpositions in another key. Again, track how many days it takes. When you complete that second set, you have two numbers to give you a good indicator of how your transposition skills have improved.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright © 2007 Darrin Koltow

This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - January 1, 2006 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.