Practice guides

Short, practical pieces on practicing with a metronome — written while teaching guitar, and meant to be used with the tool on this site.

Foundations

Pulse, pattern, and why a metronome is only a scaffold
The goal is to hold a plain pulse and do what you like with it. Everything this tool adds is scaffolding for that, and grouping is what makes a rhythm repeatable instead of accidental.
Thinking in clock time: position and length
Rhythm works like a clock: every event has a position and a length. The one difference is that a beat can change length — and that is what tempo is.
Accents: how a pulse becomes a beat
Volume, pitch and timbre turn a flat pulse into beats and meters — but the biggest accent is the one the listener supplies. Why players need an inner beat.
Meter and beat division
Meters group beats the way days group hours, and dividing the beat works like splitting an hour. Why popular music leans on beat two, and why 3+3 and 2+2+2 are different sixths.
Feeling the beat with your body
Make the beat with your foot, use the lift for the division, and add your hands for four basic grooves. Includes the tempo range where a beat is easy to feel.
Why the metronome keeps getting ahead of you
Rushing and dragging are not a tempo problem — they are a listening problem. How to practice with a click so that it stops fighting you.
Choosing a practice tempo (and when to raise it)
How to pick a starting tempo that teaches you something, and the test that tells you it is time to move up.

Move the click to 2 and 4
Putting the click on the backbeat exposes time problems that a click on every beat hides.
Getting into 5/4 and 7/8
Odd meters are easier when you stop counting and start grouping. How to set the dial up for it.
Swing: shifting the position
Swing moves the offbeat later, not the beat. How swinging the 1/2 point relates to triplets, and why swinging the 1/4 and 3/4 points is a different groove.
Note length: where a sound starts and ends
Rhythm is not only when a note starts but where it ends. Note values, decaying and sustained sounds, staccato — and back to position and length.

Three against two: a step-by-step way to feel it
The most common polyrhythm, built up in five steps you can practice on a circular dial.