Using Accents to Improve Accuracy with Metronome Practice



This weeks practice has been focused on a tricky piece of music that involves a ton of string skipping at high speeds.

I found I was losing track of the count at a particular point, and often dropping a sixteenth note which would throw off my timing completely.

Part of the solution was to use the metronome ladder discussed a couple of weeks ago, but I still found that at high speeds things were coming undone.

So I started heavily accenting the first note in each beat. I also made sure to notate the accents on my tab - it’s always a good idea to notate aides for practice, whether it’s accents, the fingers you are using (you can also see this on the tab) or the count you are using at a particular point:

Adding the accents to the tab reminds me to use it in the following practice session
Tab notated with accents to help practice

Always make life as easy as possible!

It’s a technique I’ve used often before, but I don’t know about you, sometimes I forget to do the obvious stuff.

Anyway, it really helped, and I managed to hit my target tempo in a coupel of days, getting from 102bpm to 110bpm. 

110bpm is still a little sloppy, but I reckon with another week of practice, using tempo ladders and accents, I’ll have it locked down.

What is an accent?

Just in case you’re not sure - an accent is when we pick the string a bit harder.

So in the above tab, the accent is the first beat of each group of four sixteenth notes, so that note is picked harder than the rest.

Conclusion

If you find yourself getting lost with your metronome, try using accents to keep your playing tight.

This is a great exercise to apply to licks made using the Simple Solo Builder, which is the simplest, and most fun, way to start lead guitar.