How To Use A Metronome When Fingerpicking The Blues



A reader of How to Practice Guitar and Train Your Creativity recently emailed me asking about how to apply some metronome exercises from my book to Piedmont style fingerpicking (often referred to as Travis Picking).

His Question

Considering your advice below, how would you apply it to songs?

I am learning to fingerpick blues, mostly Piedmont style (often erroneously called “Travis picking”).

The bass alternates between two bottom strings, usually either six and four or five and four, and are almost always quarter notes. Melody notes are on the top three strings, either played as quarter notes by pinches or eighth notes in between the bass notes.

This gets really tricky for me when I try to play it with a metronome. I think I could try your idea but there’s nothing regular about when there are quarter notes and when there are eighth notes.

Would you actually suggest programming a metronome so the eighth notes come in when the melody notes do?

Metronome Advice

The metronome advice that David is referring to is found on pages 63 to 64:

Have your metronome count the smallest subdivision that you are playing. If you are playing an exercise that has 16ths, make sure the metronome is counting 16ths. If you are playing something that moves between various subdivisions, consider programming a custom metronome in Guitar Pro / MuseScore / Logic Pro etc.

How to Practice Guitar and Train Your Creativity

My Reply

There are two ways that you can approach this:

  1. Have the metronome count in quarter notes, and have it count the eighth notes when required (this is only possible using a software metronome)
  2. Have the metronome count in eighth notes

You said that you found this “really tricky”, which is great! That means we’ve found a problem area that we can work on that will help you improve.

When students find this sort of exercise tricky, 99% of the time they are trying it too fast. They are often surprised at just how slowly you have to set the metronome in order to be able to get the hang of it.

When practising, my metronome is often set to 30bpm, so that I can nail the rhythm, before making it faster.

I don’t know if you are reading the melody or working from memory, but memorising the melody, or at least, memorising the chunk that you are on will be very helpful.

So here is how I would approach practising this:

  • Have the metronome in eighth notes
  • Slow the metronome down. If you’re struggling, it’s too fast. Don’t think less of yourself if you have to play at 5bpm to get this right, it is what it is
  • Make sure you are counting out loud while practising
  • Work on only one bar at a time (this will help with the melody notes feeling “random”, you’ll be surprised at how much you can memorise when you work this way)
  • Do that bar several times in a row, with a rest between each repetition. Then do the second bar the same way. Then put the two together, etc.

Following this approach you should be able to incrementally master the music that you’re working on.

Have fun!