 Hi guys this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music in this lesson we are going to look at five ways to improve your practice using the metronome tool right all of you know the metronome tool perhaps if you are a musician who has been playing even for a few months you know the this thing right so it basically keeps you in time because it's a very mechanical or electronic tool now so you assume that it's absolute perfection okay so the first thing is when you set a metronome for a song right now I have set the metronome to 94 beats per minute which I sort of felt worked for the riff which I just about played now which is something like right if I have to practice that with 94 BPM with the metronome I'm actually playing it playing the metronome to go with my head movement one two three four so if I actually play along with it my head is actually going with a metronome it's sort of sinking very well so that is the first word of advice when you're setting the metronome for a song observe how the pulses in my case I use my head a lot with the pulse some of you may use your foot some of you may just tap your leg or you know clap or whatever you a snap or do whatever you want to do right so the metronome needs to be set ideally with the pulse of the song then you also feel the music better and it's a very important step choosing the metronome because once you choose the metronome you're gonna do things like record the song and when you record the first part on your DAW or recording device you've committed to that speed haven't you you can't really change that so you need to be really really clear that 94 BPM is going to work for your song so take the time and what I would also recommend you to do is when you play the music don't look at time played very naturally so if you're all alone in your house what you could do is put on a recording app on your cell phone or something and play the riff very organically very naturally once you've played the recording you can hear it back and then use a feature which is there on most metronome apps which is called as tap tempo so if I use my app and just go tap tempo try to sing you see it's averaging well to about 90 94 beats per minute yeah it's pretty much 94 wow that's quite cool actually so average it out with a few taps maybe you could play about 10 15 taps or play for about four bars and then see what it average take the average of all your visual cues which the metronome is giving you and yeah that's your tempo so don't let the metronome force the tempo out of the song if you are giving it to the tempo based on what is the most natural for you so when once you have chosen the speed of the song you then need to practice you then need to really feel attached to the song and you need to feel very confident with the song that is very very important before you record it so one misconception which a few people have is why don't I make the metronome faster if I for example it's 94 if I doubled it so you feel a lot more relaxed right because you have a lot more beats to kind of latch on to a rely on but actually what may be happening is you're following the metronome too much right and you're not developing your own natural sense of timing and then you lose the feel when you play your instrument where you lose that natural feel for all you know when you recorded it without the metronome it actually sounded better so you may not want to reduce your feel or your natural flair and make the track to robotic because you're following the click and then people lose that sense of movement so I would always encourage you don't go faster if you found that the metronome is fast 188 BPM if it was that just try to move your head and you'll see how annoying it probably is you know 3 4 1 2 3 I don't think you'll not even the audience who hears you will move their head like that so you need to go back to a speed which is the pulse of the song and practice with that speed this is how your head is moving okay and now to further improve your timing actually half it by 2 so now 94 divided by 2 equals to 47 so now the problem is this feels like the new pulse right but the music should ideally not change it should still be so you're probably not hearing too many beats you're hearing like beat number one or beat number three yeah that's what you're hearing now isn't it 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 agreed 1 2 3 4 so as you're hearing less of the beat you're being less reliant on the click track so I think that's a great way to practice and improve your timing a lot more you go 2 3 4 so it's divided by 2 so it's still the same song it's still the same thing you're practicing 94 BPM you're just hearing a little less of it so you go 47 BPM but it's actually 94 BPM it's half right go what I like about 47 is your less reliant on the metronome and thus you play less robotic so what you'll find in my piano playing is perhaps the dynamics of what I'm doing is growing I'm giving better focus on my volume control I'm giving more importance and more respect to the notes at the same time I have this friend which is helping me keep time so I am reliant on the metronome but not obsessed with it I'm not really dependent on it so much right so it's just there it's just a guide so that's what I like by halfing you know so that I would advise you to do for anything you're working on so if you've composed a lick on 100 beats per minute practice it at 50 right you definitely don't want to practice a lick which you can composed at 100 at 200 that would be too fast and then you're just being a slave to the metronome which we don't want you could push this even further not by speed you could actually push this even further by perhaps halfing this even more so what is half of 47 23.5 I don't have 23.5 so I'm just going to do 23 okay this is literally like the one of the bar isn't it so try to get aligned with that with this and a good way to keep on time is to actually also count the subdivisions three and four and one and two actually counting the subdivisions helps stay on in the zone as opposed to one two three four one you may go a bit wrong but one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and two and or you can divide by four one and a two and a three and a four and a one and a two and a three four and no one and right so keep that going and once you can really feel your riff over this then I would advise you to start playing or before playing you could perhaps sing it and when you're comfortable right so you see what the metronome is doing now is not the pulse it's just a half-end version where you have less beats to work with so what I did first was I set the metronome to go with my pulse or head movement then we divided it by two so 94 became 47 became a lot more tougher to practice but if you ask me a lot more inspiring to practice because it also brings the musicality out of you when you when you record eventually right and then if you half it even more it's like a it's like a more sporting kind of deal you know you're like trying to tell you say how good am I actually with time you know trying to really push yourself to the end limits of time so that's I think something we all like to do as musicians as well like when you approach music in this sort of sporting way it can give you some nice goals it can get you it can push you to achieve greater things you know so that in a nutshell is this first way of using the metronome let's now move on to the second way of using the metronome right so with this tip or technique of using the metronome what I do is I set the metronome to the pulse of whatever song I have composed or whatever passage of music I have prepared and I've ended up figuring out that it is at this speed right this is how my head naturally moves as I told you in the earlier clip so you go three four one and then you play what you have to play with the click it's a very triplet feel kind of groove right so now to improve your chops just remember that the faster you go it's more for the mechanical side and the muscular side in you for example your fingers may not be agile or adept or strong enough to take on the challenge of playing at even maybe 10 bpm faster than this so that will push your mechanical side right and you'll figure out yeah if I do this a bit more yes my fingers are going to get better and better that's one side of the equation the other side is to go slower so if you go slower you train the mind okay so that's another tip while using the metronome when you've chosen it to a certain speed what you then want to do is go a little faster and then go a little slower when you go a little faster what happens is you work on the mechanics you work on your body's physical ability to latch on to the stuff and when you go slower you work on your mind so I'm going to just start by going a bit faster maybe 65 for now let's see if I can actually do this 65 then you go 70 go too fast right the understanding is oh it's going fast so I have to now actually think of playing fast not really you're still following the click or trying to follow the click so as you can as you will feel it is going to work on your technique it's going to work on the mechanics and the muscles a lot more however as I go slower and slower perhaps if I practice is at 50 yeah now to even think of that riff is a little tricky right always sing before you 40 if I can see you go quite like this right so that's pretty much this second way of using the metronome it starts the same even the first way started the same choose the correct tempo which goes to the pulse or your head movement in the earlier example I was like half it half it again to really feel the beats better now what I'm advising you to do is more for your for developing your sense of time so as you go faster what'll happen is you push your muscles and your technical ability as you go slower you push your mental ability to actually be on time okay so you never know when you go faster you may like that more and you when you go slower you may actually like that more so delve into those possibilities and see how it goes let's now move to the third way of practicing with the metronome one two three four right so this third style of using the metronome will assume that whatever we hear is not the one of the bar okay so what you heard now whenever you hear the click we tend to believe that it's you know one two or two three you believe that it's a beat or in the last video which we talked about we kind of looked at it such that we say it's one two three four one two three four one two where this is the one one two three four one two three four right what I am suggesting is don't make this the one this should be the two or the three or the four or a non one beat right now I'm on 40 bpm for your reference and when I play it back the composition which I had in mind was actually on 160 bpm so if I counted one two three four a one two three four a one two three four this is sort of 160 three four a one two so now my tune is going with that sort of a feel so I have half in it to make my timing better and it's at 40 right now but I'm hearing the one of the bar so what I want that to be is two which in hindsight is how I actually compose this riff the metronome was at two and that inspired me to make what you heard now so if I now call that as two two three four a one two three four a one two three four it's a little tricky at first so what I would advise you to do is perhaps call that as two two three four one two you may not get the timing but it you will get it eventually four a one two three four a one two three four a one two three four right two three four three four I think this sounds a lot better as well just feels a little bit more exciting doesn't it or if it is the three three four three four one two three four a one two three four one two three four four you actually feel music in a very different way as you just call that three you know now I'm calling it three and I've come up with a very random tune but I kind of like it you know and if this was four four one two three four right now I'm going to 40 beats per minute and after you go to 40 do not consider what you hear as one it's the two it's the three or the four and it can strangely enough inspire you right so metronome is a great tool it's a great friend for you to have around you while you practice it can not only help you get better as a player it can also help you make music that's something I feel very strongly about this tool okay let's now move into the fourth tip which I have to practice with the metronome right guys so the fourth practice tip while using the metronome which I have for you is to explore accents now accents are some of the coolest things you will find in music everyone has used them so I'll just give you a rundown a small introduction maybe we can do a more detailed video on accents later so what happens is when the metronome is running again ideally at a very slow speed what you need to start doing is imagine the subdivisions while the metronome is going at in this case 70 beats per minute so you go one e and a two e and a three and a four e and a right e and a two e and a three so this is the pulse my head is moving like that sort of slow one e and a two e and a three and a four e and a one e and a two e and a right so if you were to compose music using one e and a two e and a three and a four e and a what tends to happen would be you may come up with something like you know you may divide the beat the beat structure into four equal pieces per beat that's four four four four one e and a two e and a three and whatever you know so it sounds nice but it doesn't actually groove groove actually happens when these accents come in so accents are basically irregular divisions of an already divided beat so of an already divided beat system so if the beat is divided into four what these accents do is they'll mess it up a little bit instead of dividing you're you're still dividing the beat by four so listener moves to the music but it's unpredictable because the the way the notes align themselves happen in other cycles so the the passage of music which I played right now for you was one was four four three three two if i'm not mistaken and what what you can do is if you do the math that's four plus four plus three plus three plus two it still adds up to 16 16th notes or 16 semi quavers if you want to call it that but it's just a bit irregular so i'm doing something like so with the way i'm voicing it now with a click you'll find that i'm giving different importance to each beat and the relevant sub beats so you go this is without accents right another thing we say in Indian music is we could do something like where the top is essentially the downbeat of the bar or every downbeat rather so what we're trying to do is so it's sort of like a immediately it becomes a very vocal phrase i'm doing four four three three two so i'm actually filling in a nice musical sentence and i'm then cycling that and i think it also makes the composition a bit more memorable what you could do with chords you could also change the chord with every strong accent hit so one two three so whenever the chords change you you feel the accent a lot more while you're practicing this with the click pay strong attention to the accent also play strong attention to the division of the beat so you're dividing the beat into four one e and a two e and a three and a four e and a and then partitioning into different beat clusters so you go four four three three two four four three two sorry three three two right and all you also know one of the most famous songs ever written you know this one he's doing it in one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three four one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three four three one two three one two three one two three one two one two if you can divide four into two right or you can say tuck it tuck it tuck it tuck it tuck it tuck it tuck it tuck it tuck it tuck it tuck it It's still 16th note, it's still dividing the beat by 4. So again, with all of the tips which I am suggesting, try to slow your metronome down. If you observe, I have never really used a fast speed while practicing and I think that's the way to go. Because if you want to play fast, you can play fast, you don't have to have the metronome playing fast. Right? So the fifth practice tip which I would like to share with you is where you could use some advanced tech features on these latest metronome apps which are there in the market both on the iOS store or the Android store. So an app which I use and I think a lot of us use in India is called ProMetronome. It's very stable, you can use it at gigs as well and it has a lot of features. You can have a stage mode where you set your playlist, your song list which has a customized metronome setup like tempo as well as time signature. So what you could do or what I am going to do now in this lesson, I am going to tell you three features of ProMetronome and probably some other apps out there as well which you can really use to take your practice to the next level to inspire you, push you and also make you sweat it out a lot. You have something called a rhythm trainer. So if I turn on rhythm trainer and first of all it tells me play two bars and mute two bars. So that's an interesting way to practice. What's going to happen is you play the click, it will play for two bars and then it perhaps won't play for two bars which is exactly what's happening. So you have to be a bit good at time. So that's a nice practice tool which is quite a nice thing to set up for anyone. So then you also have, you can make the rhythm trainer go into random mode, absolute random where you will be like us having a sliding feature where you either mute most of the thing or you choose the metronome to play most of the thing. So I'm going to choose it somewhere 50-50 and show you what it's doing. What it's actually going to do is it will play a little and then it will stop whenever it wants and then you can't like complain and say the metronome sucks because a metronome is an electronic tool. I'm going to play it and then it's going to do all this random muting. I don't even know when it would mute. I can't even explain it to you. So that's what's cool about the random feature. Okay. Yeah, a little scary, right? But a lot of fun. It can also inspire you. It becomes like a call and response kind of thing. Whenever the metronome's on, you kind of do one kind of thing or one melody. When the metronome's off, you could try and do a counter melody, change your chords, change the groove and see how it goes. It can also remember with all these tools as grueling and mind-boggling as they are, they can also be very inspiring and help you a lot with making music, which is something you should also be aware of while you're using it. Okay. The second sort of advanced version of the metronome is where you can set up your practice. So what I like to do is they have this thing called an automator. So it tells you every two bars increase by something or every X amount of bars increase by something, what will be your start tempo and what will be your max tempo. So I'm going to be like every two bars increase by seven beats per minute, which you can adjust here, the start tempo and the max tempo is 150, there we go, 95, okay, faster. So that's mode number two where you automate it. So it's just nicer for the, when you practice, you sort of feel a gradual, this was a bit sudden because I just wanted to show you all quickly. But in an actual practice, you'll probably increment by about two BPM or five BPM every four or eight bars. So that way you finally reach your goal. But then you don't be like, I have to do it. I have to do it. Can I do it? You know, you're not thinking about your skill, you're just playing it naturally and just letting it kind of push you to the final level. Sort of like a music teacher teaching you drums or something, right? Okay. And the third way of using the, a third advanced feature on this metronome app would be the subdivisions. So if I use subdivisions over, let's say 80 BPM, you know, you have these subdivisions which could go eighth notes, triplets, like a shuffle, swing, feel or semi-quavers or maybe a permutation of semi-quavers, which is like one E and two E and three E and three E. So it's quite interesting because that itself is sort of like a groove you could adapt some music over. I hope that makes sense. These are five ways to practice with the metronome. So moving forward, what I'd advise you to do is check out the description. Very important to check out the description. You will find all the pieces of music which I played, go through them, jam along. I've also taught the harmonic and the other stuff in the, in the links. So check that out. And also stay tuned or follow the, follow through to the next video. Once you've sort of assimilated this information on how to practice the metronome to actually be creative and compose, okay? So that's what we are going to also share. So please be aware of that lesson as well, okay? So in this video, we watched five ways of doing the metronome to practice. Let's just recap. First of all, we slowed the thing down and we slowed it down always by half and then half of that half. Then we went a bit faster to push our muscles. We went slower to push our mind. Then what did we do in the third instance? We tried to practice specific beats where you feel only the non-one of the bar. You're feeling beat two, beat three or beat four. So I showed you in this example how we felt beat two for the most part. Then in example four or fourth way to practice, I've used the metronome at a fairly slow speed but used irregular accent patterns. For example, four plus four plus three plus three plus two to develop some interesting musical phrases. And in the fifth practice methodology, I've taken the metronome and just explored some of its advanced features, if you will. So have fun with this and do stay tuned to our YouTube channel for a lot more videos. You can head over to the playlist where we've organized all our content quite well. There's some of my music as well. If you like some of my tunes or some of my compositions, you can head over to the channel and please subscribe and more importantly, turn on that bell icon for notifications. And you do that whenever we release a new lesson or a new song or a new riff, you will get an update and you could consider watching it. And do share this channel as well with all your musician friends. We have a lot of things for beginners. We have stuff for advanced people. We have things for producers and so on and so forth. And our school, Nathaniel School of Music is now a very online music school. We do a lot of these short courses on various topics as well as workshops. So if any of you would like to learn, we are leaving our email ID in the description, which is music at nathanielschool.com, you just write to us, tell us what you would like to learn and we could then inform you whenever these things happen. So again, thanks for your patience watching this video. And I hope you have a lot of fun with the metronome. Please make sure you have fun with it first. Don't look at just using it. Oh, I have to practice. I have to get better. No, just do it to have fun. Enjoy yourself. And then the metronome will start being your friend. And then you can really rely on it when you practice and compose music. See you in the next video. Cheers.