Rob Schumann: In the second segment, we will look at subdividing the beat and using the metronome in our practice. For starters, just to feel the beat, we would want to practice with quarter notes, and that's filling an attack for every beat, and you can really take anything that you're working on to use this. In this case, let's just look at the two octave C major scale, and if you need these frets, you can find them in the tab at the beginning of the video.
I am just going to play up the C scale. I have got this metronome set to 80, and usually when I start to practice something, I will keep it between 60-80, that's a nice slow tempo, but below 60, is so slow that you really can't feel where the beat is going to fall because there is so much room in between the beats. So anything above 60 and probably below 80 is a good place to start. So we are just going to play this scale, trying to feel the beat, and place quarter notes with each click. So we are going to listen to it for little bit, feel where that groove is, one, two, three, four.
So you notice that each of those pitch attacks happened right with the metronome speed. And I should also mention that even before you put something with a metronome, you really want to have the fingerings and the picking pattern sort of down under your hands. A lot of times people will try to get something rhythmically before they even really got the notes down. So you do have to kind of study it and have to memorize it, and then start putting it with the beats, and once again you want to start slow.
So we are doing on the quarter notes. Once we are able to get it even, the next trick is to start bumping the tempo up. That's kind of get something under your hands, it's also going to get you learning it at multiple speeds which is important for getting used to locking into beats.
So I just had this on 80 and usually you will bump things up either four or eight BPMs at a time, and you listen that it's almost hard to sound that you sped it up. So I am going to bump this up to 88, and we will play the same thing at quarter notes, two, three, four.
Now, the really cool thing about this is, you notice it really wasn't that much different with eight subdivisions sped up there, eight BPM sped up. You can gradually speed up the metronome and your hand really won't know the difference as you start doing it, and so you can really trick your hand to learning things to speeding it up and getting it faster and faster.
On our next segment, we will look at our remaining subdivisions and how to practice those with the metronome.
Alex Lifeson: It starts on the low E string and it was like this -- so then it's the B, A and see I keep this B string ringing on the G throughout the whole thing.
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