simple metronome
Using a metronome when practicing guitar is essential. Besides the obvious benefit of helping to develop your sense of timing and rhythm, a skill that many beginning guitarists overlook, it has many other benefits as well. By making you more conscious of when you are hitting the note you will have a tendency to play the note more cleanly instead of fumbling over the hard parts.
The point of most guitar excercises -scales, arpeggios, etc. is to build muscle memory in our hands. I believe that if each movement is timed in a rhythmic manner the reinforcement will happen more quickly and be more accurate.
Since almost every guitar teacher will tell you to start a lesson or exercise slowly and increase the tempo as you begin to gain confidence, the metronome will also act as a ruler to this progress.
So yes, if your serious about learning the guitar you need a metronome. That doesn’t mean you need to go buy one though. Your computer can easily tap out precisely timed clicks given some simple programming. There are many downloadable software metronomes as well as online versions. I have tried many of them but found an almost universal problem with all of them. The sounds they use are really annoying and unmusical. For this reason I will often open a program like Garageband and create a simple rhythm to use for this purpose.
But I recently found an online metronome I really like. Bestmetronome.com is actually 3 metronomes. All are still in beta and have different requirements to run. They each have different features. From the barebones a.bestmetronome.com which also has a tap-tempo setting. To my favorite for everyday practice – simple.bestmetronome.com which is an emulation of a real world wind-up metronome. Best of all it has a nice old school, analog sound to it. There is also a very feature-rich version, which is really a drum machine as it allows you to mix and match multiple sounds in any order you choose – advanced.bestmetronome.com . Here’s a video demonstrating metronomes and their use with the guitar. Notice how annoying this guys metronome sounds.
