Fun with Metronomes (Part 4)

Today's talk is about metronomes -- playing with them and making them fun!

Welcome Back!

We're going to do something that's one of the more challenging things to do -- set your metronome to beat one.

Before we get there -- we're going to work our way up. We'll start with it set to beat one and three. And then, we'll remove beat three and just have beat one happening. So all you get is your downbeat!

I've set my metronome to 30 beats per minute, and I've got my eighth notes happening - so that's gonna give me the sound of beat one, and then beat three. Then I take my eighth notes out and that gives me a beat one here. You'll hear what I'm talking about.

So we're going to count this set as one, two, three, four....one, two, three, four. But instead of doing that, I'm gonna play my snares on two and four,

Right?

So now I've got the feel of it and I'm going to take out that beat three and only have my beat one. So....

All right, it took me a few measures to get there, but I started to feel more comfortable with it as it went.

Now, if we want to start adding in the things we talked about in our last lesson, where we started to introduce some of our drum fills and things like that. This is where it really starts to get challenging. So I'm going to go back to get my feel here. Then I'm gonna start to add drum fills on the one beat. So I'll do a 16th note drum fill on beat four and see if I can maintain that feel here.

One, two, three, four....one, two, three, four.

And now, I'll see if I can do a two beat. So beats three and four 16th though.

All right! We could keep building that up. We can throw in some triplets and and all kinds of different things. And then we can start to expand the number of beats that we do and things like that.

So jump into this! See how it goes for you. I would love to see some video replies on this.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes and share them. I certainly made mistakes and was not perfect in these demonstrations, but hopefully it shows you how I go about using the metronome to improve my time.

I especially do these in the songs that I'm about to play live, or that I need to prepare for, because I want to make sure that I have a really good sense of time in the studio . And then, I'm not relying on the metronome so much for everything. I want to feel like the drum fills and things that I do have their own momentum, their own time. And I don't feel timid when I approach the things that I'm wanting to do.

Good luck and have fun out there!

Cheers!

Josh