Subject: How's Your Timing?
You are getting this e-mail because you subscribed to it on www.learn-to-play-rock-guitar.com. If you don't want to receive these e-mails any longer, go to the bottom of this message and click on "unsubscribe." Hey there Friend, Now that we've talked a bit about the difference between timing and rhythm, let's get into how to improve on your timing. I mentioned that one of the best ways to check your timing is to record yourself playing to a metronome or a click track in your recording software (also know as the DAW, or digital audio workstation). This is a great diagnostic approach that gives you visual proof of how well you are staying in time with the beat of the music.Let's look at some examples of what I'm talking about. Leading the Beat  Good Timing  Behind the Beat  Once you have this visual proof, you can easily analyze what I'll call your timing tendencies. Are you consistently right on with each beat marker, or do you find yourself playing a little before the beat? Maybe you lag a few milliseconds behind the beat. Overall, if you review your performance in the DAW you will get a pretty good idea of how your playing averages out, whether before, behind or right on the beat. What to do with this new-found knowledge? This is where you can really begin to work out a plan for improvement and mastery over timing issues. What's that, you say? You have perfect timing? OK, maybe you don't (think you) need to practice this, but for the rest of us out here, we need to do the wood-shedding to get our timing solid and consistent all the time, every time (or at least be striving for it). And for that we need a strategy and a plan to "get 'er done." What I have found to be the fastest way to improve my timing is to slow down. It seems a little counter-intuitive - to go fast you need to slow yourself down. But if you think about it, no one truly masters anything by rushing through to get to the end result in the fastest time possible. You have to devote time and deliberate effort to get really good at doing anything. No one is the perfect expert their first time. One of the problems we face with this approach is we are an impatient species. It's not in our nature to take things slowly. We want to rush and get good at our activities as quickly as possible. I think this tendency has been made worse by our society, though. We have this competitive streak in us where we need to get 'there' before anyone else, and this even comes in to play when we're competing with ourselves! I need to do it better and faster than I did it the last time... I don't know about you, but that approach always leads to frustration for me. Maybe it's simply that instinctive urge to survive that drives us to push faster and harder, and maybe society never really ascended above this base, instinctual need to survive. We compete for love and acceptance. We have to be competitive in school to get the best grades, we have to compete to find a job, then we have to compete to keep that job (not that I think this is the way it should be, but that's an entirely different discussion). Sports practically deifies competition - come to think of it, music is not much different. In fact, look at any endeavor in our modern society and see if you can find something that doesn't force us to compete at some level with other people. All of this competition pushes us to try and improve at a faster rate. But faster practice is almost never better practice. When we do anything faster, there is a much higher likelihood to miss important details. We tend to begin making mistakes, and the faster you go, to more noticeable and damaging those mistakes become. Try playing along with Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, John Petrucci or Joe Satriani without learning the techniques they use to achieve their ability to play burning riffs in perfect time. Unless you're a prodigy (or freak of nature), you won't get to their level of mastery without slowly practicing scales and exercises and the many techniques they use to create their sounds. Do you want to get better? Here's the secret (not really a secret, but it seems to get lost in the noise). I am telling you to slow it down. Anything that you want to improve at. Slow it down. If you think about it, it makes sense. When we slow down enough to be able to really focus on the current project, whatever it is, we can catch details we would otherwise miss. We can head off costly mistakes and prevent creating bad habits that will take ten times as long to break. When it comes to guitar, we can hear all the little inflections and subtle nuances of tone. We can hear the way we're playing each note and can isolate areas where we need to work on technique or fingering. We will know when our timing doesn't line up with the rhythm of the song. If we use software such as Song Surgeon to slow the tempo of a song we want to learn, we can easily break a guitar solo down because it is so much easier to hear the licks and string changes. By slowing down, we will actually improve faster than by trying to do things too quickly in the beginning. And to really drive this idea home, realize this: as your playing improves because you slowed down to train your fingers and absorb the techniques into your brain, every time you learn a new song or pick up a new technique, it will come to you exponentially faster - you will build on what you already know. Slowing down in your practice sessions allows your fingers to create muscle memory for patterns and tactile learning - how much pressure you need to use to get nice, clear notes and chords, bending to the correct pitch, solid hammer-ons and -offs, etc. You can really pinpoint any issue you find along the way when you take the time to play things slowly enough perfect them. You've got to watch yourself, though. Practicing at slow speeds can be very difficult. You really have to concentrate to prevent yourself from speeding up. This is why practicing with a metronome or a drum backing track is critical. You've got to make sure you maintain the proper tempo while you're mastering any timing issues. That should get you started with getting your timing in order. Let me know if you have any questions. As always, Rock on! Peace~ Dave Dave "Eddie" Vance is a rock guitar enthusiast and gear nut. He has been playing guitar for over 30 years and enjoys tormenting the neighbors every chance he gets. When he's not slaving for the man, you can find him rocking out with his B.C. Rich Bich guitar, a cold beer and some sweet tunes. He also runs Learn-To-Play-Rock-Guitar.com, but you knew that already! Follow Learn To Play Rock Guitar:I welcome your feedback! Did you like today's message? What other topics would you like to see covered in my e-mails? 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