playing with metronome

any one have any ideas on how you play and sing while counting with the metronome all at the same time? it just doesn't happen for me.

Practise playing and singing to the metronome separately until you can do each of them comfortably, then combine them.

just use it to keep the beat, like a very uncreative drummer. play on the beat, play around the beat, be creative with it.

What sort of metronome are you using?

I've got an electronic one and it just doesn't seem to work very well for me at all. The electronic tones for the beats and the start of the bars just don't seem to register well enough over the playing and singing.Not just volume (it can be used with a headphone) , but also just the type of tones they are. The dial is also too small.

By contrast I have an old fashion clockwork one which works much better. The sounds are much clearer and easier to hear separately from the music, and the pendulum arm is big metal thing about ten times the size of its electronic cousin, so the eye and brain pick it up much better. It also gives me a better feel for how long it is before the next beat starts.

Once I'm getting a bit more solid on something I can switch to the small one, but the big guy seems much better at the start. Getting a foot tapping with the metronome often seems to help too.

Cheers,

Chris

i like the fact that mine's not very loud, because when i'm strumming or drumming on my practice pad, i can make it disappear by playing on the beat.

Mine says Matrix on it, MR-500. It's just something that clicks time to how many beats you set it at. It's nothing fancy.

I'm trying to make sure that I strum the correct number of strums to the measure. I'm not able to count the number of strums and count the number of clicks at the same time. what kind of metronome would make this easier?

I might get shot for it but just turn the darn thing off. Concentrate on your vocals and have the guitar follow, playing accoustic guitar songs on your own with a metronome sounds stiff, goes against nature and is just a general crime against mankind. ;) Practicing just the guitar to a metronome is good but when you try an actual song just go with the flow.

I might get shot for it but just turn the darn thing off.

Wont get shot from my direction cause I agree... although I think its important to practice with a metronome.. I wouldnt do with while learning the playing/singing thing. Mostly because I think relaxation is a key part to doing that.

Jim

hmmm.....

i thought you had to have the right number of strums per measure, which should match up to where you were supposed to be in the lyrics for the next chord change.

so i don't have the big problem that i thought i had? i can just play and sing like i was doing?

You definitely do *not* want an exact same pattern all the time, listen to some Dylan and you'll hear there's plenty of random stuff happening. You do want to work with measures and a general structure but a metronome only serves to make each measure precisely as long and that's kinda pointless. So practice the chord progression on the guitar with a metronome, practice the vocals along with the record and then just play and sing, slowly, on your own.

A neat trick that seems to work for me is underlining 'key syllables' which fall precisely on the beat. As long as you sing these key parts correctly you can do the rest of the sentence freestyling. Most importantly though is that you know both parts well seperately before trying both together, you'll want to know both parts well and one of them should be near-automatic (usually the guitar). If you have to think about what chord is next or what the next verse was again you'll be spending too much energy on that and there's only so much a brain can effectively handle.

cool. then i'll go back to what i was doing. i'm working on pretty simple songs as far as the guitar is concerned. as far as vocals go, i'm taking voice lessons to work that up better. next step is to record some of what i'm doing, but i still need a better computer for that. so i'm working on work to get the funds. i thought it was going to happen a little sooner but here we are at February and i'm still in the same place with that.

I might get shot for it but just turn the darn thing off. Concentrate on your vocals and have the guitar follow, playing accoustic guitar songs on your own with a metronome sounds stiff, goes against nature and is just a general crime against mankind. ;) Practicing just the guitar to a metronome is good but when you try an actual song just go with the flow.

I agree 100%. You need to practice and develop your skills individually, and then just put it all together.

However, one technique which might help is to sing the time as you practice with a metronome. I think it is very valuable practice to cout (1 - 2 & 3 & 4 - etc), but I also think it helps to sing the time instead of just saying the time. Start with a plain quarter notes and then start throwing in eights, sixteenths and triplets.

Just a suggestion. Good luck!

I might get shot for it but just turn the darn thing off. Concentrate on your vocals and have the guitar follow, playing accoustic guitar songs on your own with a metronome sounds stiff, goes against nature and is just a general crime against mankind. ;) Practicing just the guitar to a metronome is good but when you try an actual song just go with the flow.

As it happens, I agree. If you want to sing to a metronome, do Opera. One of the best things about what we do is you can drift off the beat a touch and it'll still sound fine.

Best,

A :-)

listen to some Dylan and you'll hear there's plenty of random stuff happening.
nope.
actually, his picking and strumming patterns are usually well thought out and consistent, with a few exceptions where it's obviously a first take and he's searching at first, but once he gets locked in, it's steady. listen to his early albums or his cover albums for clear examples where his guitar is up in the mix. he's rarely flashy, but there's a lot going on there... the steady downbeat of "the times they are a changin", the fingerpicking of "don't think twice" and many others, the aggressive attack of "hurricane", the blues riffs of songs like "rainy day women" and "down the highway", the bleakness of "all along the watchtower", the open tuned depression that permeates "blood on the tracks", the complex partial chord riffs that fill his cover albums. even when he's with a band, you can sometimes hear his guitar, strumming away rhythmically. dylan is an incredibly underrated guitar player. he's -always- working it. even his guitar solos, which might seem silly at first, really work well once you realize that they're rhythmic devices, as opposed to melodic ones.

as for having problems with the metronome... just use it as a guide, not a slavedriver. it'll let you know if you lost or added a beat, because you'll be playing on the offbeat, or a different strum in your pattern will be on the click. it'll tell you if you're rushing or dragging, because the beeps will come too soon or too late. it's just constant feedback. if you lose your place, try to find it again. if you're in a band and you mess up, you better be able to find your way back into the mix. you don't have to count 1e&a or anything like that.

Well, in that case I'm deaf. I'm listening to Bob Dylan right now and I could swear I hear him vary the theme. An extra upstroke here, a different accent there. I've got his biography right here and I've read about his numerical system and such but I'm just going by what I hear on the record.