Why you’re not making the progress you could be making with the metronome
By Janus Buch

In the modern world of guitar apps, youtube and rocksmith an often overlooked tool for improving your guitar skills is the good old metronome. In the old days, a metronome was just about the only tool, that were available for musicians to work on their various skills except playing with real musicians of cause. In my experience as a full time guitar teacher I see a lot of players who only focus only on getting the metronome speed of their licks or scales up and in doing so, they don’t utilise the full potential of the metronome. In this article I will show you some ways, that you can use the metronome to learn more and improve faster.

Expanding the possibilities of the metronome.

In how many different ways can you actually use a metronome in your guitar practise? The answer is, I don’t know yet, but probably a in a lot more ways than you think at the moment. Most people think the metronome is for practising rhythm stuff only and that is it, but it can be used in a lot broader sense as well. How about practising scales with the metronome, or notes on the guitar neck or even different chord voicings. And here I’m not talking about the playing of scales or the chords in time. Rather I’m suggesting to use the metronome as the versatile training tool that it was meant to be. So how well do you know you’re chord voicings? Will you be able to change to a new voicing every forth metronome beat at 90 bpm? How about every second beat or even on all beats. How about the C# notes on the guitar? Can you find a new C# note on every beat of the metronome? The same applies to scales. Can you change the key of the pentatonic scale staying in the same place on the fretboard every 4 beat?

These are just examples that I came up with for this article, but the general idea here is this. The metronome quantises stuff and makes them measurable and this is key to you improvement as a guitar player. If you can’t measure it, what does knowing your scales even mean?

These specific exercises will help you to, but what will really help you is learning the thought process of taking an area of which you lack someting on the guitar an making it into an measurable exercise. This what the pros do all the time and if you wanna get at a pro level you need to start thinking like the pros do. But whatever you do decide to practice, doing so with a metronome will help keep you on track, measure your progress and get you bigger results faster!

About the author: Janus Buch is the owner and head guitar instructor of Bredballe Guitarskole. Bredballe Guitarskole is the number one guitarschool in the surrounding area of Vejle. Here he offers Guitar undervisning i Vejle advanced as well as beginner guitarists who are looking to improve their guitarskills. If you are struggling on guitar, then you should definitely come in for a free introductory lesson.