Fun with Metronomes (Part 3)

     This is part 3 of a 4 part video series on building your rhythmic confidence
                         by using a metronome in unconventional ways

All right! We're back for week three of our series on metronomes!

This time we're going to build on what we did last week with the one bar of 'click', and one bar of silence only.

Now, we're going to combine it with what we did in week one. where we're going to play those on the off beats on the ends. So it's going to sound like this..."one, two, three".

(Drums Playing)

Just like that. Now, to make it a little bit more interesting, I don't want you to jump into playing riffs and drum fills just yet. I want to see if you can just change the voicing of something that you're playing.

So, I'm going to play one of my toms. I'll just change the, 'and' of two and the 'and' of four. All right? I'm just gonna just change that. Maybe I'll take it off of my high hat and just put it on my Toms or something like that. So let's try that..."one, two, three".

(Drums Playing)

Alright, so that was me just improvising. But just those offbeats there. Now what we could - after you spend some time playing around with that, we can start to do just a little bit of improvisation. But I would say, just keep it to one beat. All right?

You could do one beat of triplets or 16th notes or eighth notes, whatever you want it. I'll just do 16th notes.

Let me reset this here. We're doing to do the same thing again. Just playing on the offbeat. So...one, two, three, four.

(Drums Playing).

There we go.

So now, we can build that up. Maybe here I'll try something a little bit different. Maybe I'll try doing a triplet just on beat four there. So..."one, two, three, four".

(Drums Playing)

All right! Now, I think that was a little bit more challenging -- because triplets to me feel like they're slowing down. Especially when you have the eighth note thing.

So it's a very interesting feel. And, you have to have a lot of confidence in your time. All right.

When you're doing that in your bar of silence. then, if you really want to take it to the next level --  you could do a bar of regular time with your click and then your bar of silence.  And, you could do that all eighth note, triplets. Let's see what that sounds like. Let's see if I can make it through. Okay, one..."two, three, four...".

(Drums Playing)

Oh! see I lost it there, but that's all right! I think that was kind of fun. I knew that I was throwing myself in the deep end on that one. It's been a while since I've done these kinds of tests with myself, but I think that's fine. So yeah, so those are going to be the challenges for this week. See what you can do. Really push yourself.

But don't go too fast. Do what I did at the beginning, where you just do one. If you're going to start doing your riffs and fills and stuff like that, just start with one beat in the silence. And then you can switch it around, like I just did with my 16th notes.

But before you go onto two beat drum fills and three beat riffs and things like that, really make sure that you 'can I do a drum frill on beat one and then go back to my beat. 'Can I do a drum fill on beat two? Can I do my riff on beat three?'

Make sure to test the waters all the way through before you start adding beats or fills and before you start pushing yourself too fast.

All right!

Good luck and have fun.

Cheers,

Josh

thetriplethreatartist.com