Why Practice with a metronome?

1) To learn to play in time. Most people left to their own devices will NOT play in time. The 'nome does not lie and will quickly expose any timing issues.

2) It gives the ability to set goals.  If you can play a passage at 100 bpm (beats per minute) right now but want to hit 120, that is an actual attainable goal as opposed to just wanting to get "faster".

3) One of the great benefits of using a metronome is that it can help you learn or absorb new things or ideas faster than without one. Remember: Practice does NOT make perfect, practicing RIGHT makes perfect.  Here is how I have seen this play out- A student is learning something new, whether it be chords, or a new scale, etc. The tendency for most people is to take that new idea or concept and play it as fast as they can, even though it is not in time and they are making serious mistakes. I have had students on multiple occasions say "I can't play that. It's too hard".  Most of the time, they CAN play it, they are just not approaching it correctly. I will turn on the metronome and set it to a tempo that is terribly slow.  Sometimes as slow as 40 bpm if necessary.  I will ask them to play.  Usually they will be able to play it perfectly. After 7 times perfect I will raise the metronome by 5 bpm.  Continue to repeat the process until mistakes become frequent.  I have had students leave playing something at a pretty fast tempo after they told me they couldn't because they slowed it down with a metronome and practiced it correctly.


Good luck on the musical journey!  -Steve
Official website Guitarlessonswylietexas.com

Joe Satriani on learning learning music theory....

A little long, but well worth the read!  

Joe Satriani from Guitar.about.com

Who would you say is your biggest musical influence that is not a guitarist? 

Joe: Well, probably my high school music theory teacher. He was the one that was able to reach me as a teenager and show me that there were mysteries out there that could be explained about music. That every musician that walked the planet before me started out equally ignorant and was taught by somebody, or a few people, about what all the musicians before them had done. I learned not only music history, but music theory and was enlightened by biographies of great musicians from the classical world, the pop world and the jazz world. All those things put together really help you sort things out. When you're a young kid and you've got music in your head, you really want to try to get it out, but you don't know how it fits together. So he was a big influence on me that way. He sort of helped me figure out what it was to be a musician. How you're supposed to go about your life. It can be very difficult. The way that all of the humans have progressed in civilization is to label things. You know, not only objects but feelings, inclinations, ideas. In the case of music, they call it music theory and make it sound more important than it really is. Basically, when you get a sound in your head, and you want to remember it, you've got to call it something. If you get a sound in your head, and you want someone else in the room to understand what it is, you've got to call it something. Whatever you call it, if that other person is familiar with that lexicon or that language, then they'll know what that sound in your head is. Imagine before there was measurement and somebody had to describe length to somebody. In music it's the same way. I can look at a musician and say "I need a minor 6th there and I need it in a triplet eighth note" and that's the language that we use and then I can communicate the sound in my head to that musician so they understand it. There's just this huge vocabulary that you have to learn in order to interpret what's going on inside of you and can understand and translate all the music coming at you from other musicians. A lot of starting out as a musician is learning that language. You learn a lot about the music that's in your head when you get that language together. It's a great experience.

Good luck on the musical journey!  -Steve
Official website Guitarlessonswylietexas.com

Happy New Year!

Here are a few highlights from the student concert that we had last fall!  

Good luck on the musical journey!  -Steve Official website Guitarlessonswylietexas.com