Time feel where your strum sits on the beat

The metronome in the bottom bar clicks every beat, which is the easiest kind of click to follow. This one can click only some beats, and can go silent for whole bars, so that you have to supply the beat. Press Start and you hear one bar of clicks on every beat (the count-in), then the pattern you chose.

The click is always in 4/4. While a silent bar plays, the beat lights go dark on purpose: you are not allowed to look at them.

With a band, the drummer’s snare lands on beats 2 and 4. You will nearly always be locking to that, not to a click on every beat. This exercise gets you used to hearing only half the beats and filling in the rest yourself.

1. Set the tool to 80 BPM, Beats 2 and 4 only, Bars with click 8, Silent bars 0, and press Start. After the count-in you hear a click on 2 and 4 and nothing on 1 and 3.
2. Tap your foot on every beat. The foot supplies the beats you cannot hear. If the foot stops, the beat stops.
3. Play D–DU–UDU on a G chord (down on 1, down on 2, up on the & of 2, up on the & of 3, down on 4, up on the & of 4). Make your strums on 2 and 4 land together with the click, so there is no gap between the strum and the click. Play the full eight bars without stopping.
4. Record it. Listen back for the click and your strum on 2 and 4. If you hear the click and then your strum, you are late. If you hear the strum first, you are early. When they sound like one sound, you are on it.
5. Change the tool to Beat 1 only and repeat. Now you hear one click per bar and make up the other three beats yourself. It is harder, so slow to 70 BPM if the strum starts wandering.

Why this works. A click on every beat lets you follow it. A click on 2 and 4, or only on 1, makes you feel the beats in between, which is what happens whenever you play with people.

This is the standard test of whether your tempo is yours or the click’s. The click goes away for a few bars and then comes back. Where it comes back tells you how far you drifted.

1. Set the tool to 80 BPM, Every beat, Bars with click 4, Silent bars 4. Press Start.
2. Play D–DU–UDU on a G chord through all eight bars and keep your foot going. During the silent bars you are the only clock.
3. Listen to the very first click after the silence, which falls on beat 1. If it lands right on your strum, you held the tempo. If your strum came before the click, you rushed (sped up). If your strum came after it, you dragged (slowed down).
4. Run ten rounds. Count how many rounds the click came back on your strum. When it is nine or ten, shorten the click: 2 bars on, 6 off, then 1 on, 8 off.
5. Record one round and listen for where the drift happens. Most players speed up on easy bars and slow down at chord changes. Write down which one is yours.

If you rush: your arm is swinging more than it needs to. Make the strums smaller and play the ups lighter. If you drag: the chord change is stealing time. Practise the change alone until your fingers arrive before beat 1, not on it.

“The pocket” is where you place your notes relative to the beat. On means exactly with it. Ahead means a hair before it, which sounds urgent and pushes the song forward. Behind means a hair after it, which sounds relaxed. The differences are tiny, roughly 10 to 30 thousandths of a second. At 80 BPM a beat lasts 750 thousandths of a second, so you are talking about a few percent of a beat.

1. Set the tool to 80 BPM, Every beat, Bars with click 8, Silent bars 0. Turn the click up so your phone can hear it as well as the guitar.
2. Hold a G chord and play one down-strum on every beat for eight bars. Take 1, on: land the strum on the click. Record it.
3. Take 2, ahead: lean forward, as if you want to hurry but the click is holding you back. Record it.
4. Take 3, behind: let the click sound first and answer it, as if you are waiting just long enough to be sure of it. Record it.
5. Open the three recordings in any editor that shows a waveform (Audacity, GarageBand and BandLab all do). Zoom in until you can see the click, a thin spike, and the start of a strum, a thicker burst. Measure the gap between them. The first string of a strum is the one to look at, because a strum takes some tens of thousandths of a second to cross the strings.

The goal is not to always sit behind or always push. It is to be able to choose. Punk and a lot of rock sit on or slightly ahead. Blues, soul and reggae sit back. Folk sits on. When you play with a drummer, line up with the snare, not the hi-hat, and if the drummer sits back, sit back with them.

Once the pattern feels automatic, you can move it. This is how guitar parts avoid sounding like a drum machine, and it is the first step toward the cross-rhythms in the Rhythm room.

Shift the pattern by one eighth

The eight slots of a bar are counted 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &. D–DU–UDU fills them like this. Shifted one slot later, the last up-stroke of the old bar wraps round to beat 1:

Count	1	&	2	&	3	&	4	&
Normal	D	–	D	U	–	U	D	U
Shifted	U	D	–	D	U	–	U	D

1. Set the click to 70 BPM, Every beat. Foot on every beat.
2. Play the normal row for four bars, then switch to the shifted row for four bars, then back. The foot and the chord changes stay exactly where they were. Only the strums move.
3. The shifted bar starts with an up-stroke on beat 1 and its first down-stroke falls on the &. If you lose it, slow the click, say the count out loud, and play the row slowly by the table.

Three against four

Play steady eighths, down-up-down-up, and put an accent on every third stroke instead of every other one. The accents do not line up with the beats, and you hear a second pulse running against the first.

1. Set the click to 60 BPM, Every beat and play eight eighths per bar on one muted chord.
2. Reset every bar. Accent strokes 1, 4 and 7 of the bar and count 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2. This is the 3–3–2 shape from the Rhythm room’s Groups of 3 and 2. Play eight bars.
3. Let it run. Do not reset at the barline: keep counting 1 2 3 straight through. The accent lands in a different place each bar, and after three bars (twenty-four strokes) it lands on beat 1 again. Say the count out loud, play three bars, and arrive back on 1 with the click.

A metric modulation changes the tempo without stopping. You take a note length you have just been playing and make it the new beat. The tempo changes by a fixed ratio, the pulse stays continuous, and the listener hears a smooth shift of gear, not a jump. Players use it to speed a verse into a chorus without a drum fill, or to leave a swing feel.

Name	The old note that becomes the new beat	Sum	From 80 BPM
Triplet becomes the beat	Quarter-note triplet: three notes in two beats	× 3/2	120 BPM
Dotted eighth becomes the beat	Dotted eighth: three sixteenths	× 4/3	about 107 BPM
Dotted quarter becomes the beat	Dotted quarter: one and a half beats	× 2/3	about 53 BPM

The sum is always the new tempo divided by the old tempo. A quarter-note triplet lasts two thirds of an old beat, so making it the new beat means the new beats come one and a half times as fast.

1. Set 80 BPM, Triplet becomes the beat, 2 bars before, 2 bars after and press Start. Just listen for three rounds.
2. You hear high clicks at 80 BPM, then a short bridge. In the bridge the high clicks carry on quietly while low clicks start, three low clicks for every two high ones. After the bridge the high clicks stop and only the low clicks go on. The low clicks are the new beat, at 120 BPM.
3. Tap your foot to the high clicks. At the bridge, switch your foot to the low clicks and do not stop. Say “1 2 3” evenly across two beats as you cross.
4. Play along: D–DU–UDU on G, strumming to the high clicks, then to the low clicks. The pattern does not change. The beat under it does.
5. Try the other two modulations. Dotted eighth is the one a delay pedal gives you, if you set it to dotted eighth: the echo lands on the new beat.
6. Take the tool away. Play four bars at 80 by foot, play three even notes across two beats once, and make those three notes the new beat. Afterwards set the metronome in the bottom bar to 120 and see how close you got.

Move on when all of these are true on a normal day:

• With the click on beats 2 and 4 only, you play eight bars and the recording shows your strum and the click as one sound.
• With two bars of click and six silent, the click comes back on your strum nine times out of ten.
• You can play the same part on, ahead and behind, and the three recordings sound different.
• You can play the shifted pattern for four bars without stopping.
• You can make a quarter-note triplet the new beat from 80 BPM, by foot, and land within five BPM of 120.