Ways to Improve Your Sense of Rhythm and Timing on Guitar

The guitarists we revere are often those who play the most soulful, the fastest, or the flashiest solos. Stylists and innovators like Eddie Van Halen, Jeff Beck, Slash, and Joe Bonamassa delight and amaze us with their skill and prowess, inspiring us to learn similar licks in the hopes of imitating them.

What we too often forget, though, is that every great soloist must also be a great rhythm player; no guitarist who isn’t would be allowed anywhere near a sizable stage or well-regarded recording studio.

Learning to play rhythm guitar well is essential to becoming a well-rounded guitarist; no matter how impressive your soloing skills are, you won’t make the band if you can’t stay in the groove. Fortunately, there are various rhythm exercises that can help you hone your rhythm skills.

How to Improve Rhythm and Timing on Guitar

Let’s take a look at some of the most popular and effective ways of improving your timing and rhythm sense.

I. Practice Using a Metronome or Click-Track

One of the surest ways to improve your sense of internal timing is by practicing using a metronome of click-track. Playing along to a metronome or click-track at any tempo will help improve your timing, but there’s a trick to getting the most out of your metronome practice–namely, take it slow.

Metronomes are devices that produce evenly timed clicks musicians use to stay in time. The first metronomes were basically pendulums with sliding weights that could be adjusted to increase or decrease the pace of the click. Today, most metronomes are digital, and you can even download metronome apps to your phone or device.

A great exercise for improving your rhythm on guitar is to set your metronome, or click-track, to forty beats per minute (40 Bpm.) Play a single note over and over, aiming to land each precisely on the click every time. This exercise sounds deceptively easy, but it can be surprisingly difficult to master.

Once you’re landing the same note consistently on the beat, challenge yourself to play a short series of notes, again on a steady beat, being careful to sound each note exactly over each click. Eventually, you’ll be able to move to play entire scales and runs with precise timing.

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get it right away; keep practicing, even if it’s only a few minutes every day. You’ll be surprised how many internal timing issues a few weeks of practicing this exercise can correct.

II. Tap Your Foot/Bob Your Head

The next time you’re watching a concert or live performance, take a second or two and watch the musician’s feet. Unless otherwise occupied with Wah, bass drum, or piano pedals, the smart money says they’ll be tapping to the beat.

Tapping your foot or bobbing your head along to the music you’re playing is another good way to sharpen your sense of rhythm and timing. Most musicians do this without even thinking about it, and you probably do also.

If you find you do, pay particular attention to that expression of your inner clock as you play rhythm guitar; if tapping your foot to the beat isn’t something you do naturally it’s no cause for alarm, but try to make it a habit by doing so every time you play.

III. Practice Different Strumming Patterns

Generally speaking, strumming patterns are how rhythm is expressed on guitar. Strumming patterns are communicated in up and down strums; a steady four-four rhythm strumming pattern might read UP-DOWN-UP-DOWN.

There are countless strumming patterns, and lots of ways to accent and flavor those patterns. Beginner guitarists as well as those of us looking to put a finer point on our rhythm guitar skills would do well to familiarize ourselves with as many strum patterns as it is practical.

Some online sources suggest beginners should learn at least three, intermediate players at least six, and advanced players no fewer than eight go-to strumming patterns.

The more strumming patterns you have at your fingertips, the better prepared you’ll be when faced with intricate or less-familiar rhythms and time signatures. By using a familiar strumming pattern as a touchstone, you’ll be better able to understand what variations of strum pattern will be necessary to accommodate a new rhythm.

IV. Try Sub-Dividing Beats into Parts

The more time that elapses between beats, the more difficult it becomes to accurately time intervening notes. Simply put, there’s far more room for error.

Imagine you’re driving along a highway with markers at every mile; should you be tasked with dropping packages at intervals of exactly one mile along this road, it would be easy enough–just drop one package at every marker.

Now, imagine you had to drop some packages at a distance of a quarter mile from each other, or even an eighth, sixteenth-, or thirty-second of a mile? Dropping these packages with any degree of accuracy is going to prove much harder.

Notes that land on the beat are like the packages placed at every marker; they’re easy to sound accurate because the beat serves as the signpost. Notes played between beats are harder to land in time, as we’re forced to estimate the distance to the next “marker.”

We can fix this problem by subdividing the beat; or, in keeping with our metaphor, by simply adding more signposts per mile of road.

To do this, you don’t need a click or metronome. To divide each beat into half notes, simply count one-and-two-and-three-and-four, instead of one-two-three-four.

Each “and” represents a halfway point between beats. To divide beats into quarters, you’d have to add three extra syllables; an example would be: one-e-and-a-two-e-and-a-three-e-and-a-four-e-and-a.

The next time you find yourself struggling with a particular rhythm, do what the pros do, and subdivide.

V. Count Out Loud

Counting out loud while playing guitar may sound way uncool; truth be told, it isn’t something I’d advise doing on stage or at your next audition. That said, counting out loud is a great way to work on sharpening up your internal sense of time.

All guitarists, and beginner guitarists especially, should count out loud as they practice their rhythm exercises during music lessons; doing so for even a few months will helps develop rhythm and timing.

VI. Check for a Pulse

When learning a new song or jamming with other musicians, the first thing you’ll need to identify is the pulse of the music in question. No matter how intricate its drumbeat is, or obscure its time signatures, every song has a “pulse” beat that anchors the rhythm.

Consider the Dave Matthews Band; many of their songs are quite intricate, and the sophisticated drum work often makes it more challenging (though not overly difficult) to identify the pulse.

If you watch a performance by the DMB though, you can easily identify the pulse by watching not Carter Beauford on the drums, but Dave himself-or more accurately, Dave’s foot.

Once you’ve identified the pulse of the song, you can use it as an anchor of sorts; even if you haven’t yet worked out the intricacies of a particular rhythm, the pulse can act as a touchstone to keep you from straying too far as you experiment with different strumming patterns.

VII. Embrace Your Inner Air-Drummer

We’ve all done it–some of us only when we think no one is looking, others whenever and wherever the mood grabs us–playing the air drums along to our favorite songs.

If you’ve ever felt foolish about your penchant for pounding air whenever Rush’s Tom Sawyer comes on the radio, here’s some good news: playing air drums can actually help improve your sense of internal timing.

When you play air drums for the purpose of improving your internal musical timing, you’re doing more than identifying the pulse of a song; you’re attending to all the hits in between the pulses, thereby reinforcing and even fine-tuning your internal time sense.

VIII. Record Your Performance

A failsafe way to test the accuracy of your timing on guitar is to record yourself practicing, then play the resulting file with an accompanying click track.

For this exercise, record yourself playing without a metronome; use your internal sense of rhythm playing timing only. Then, use your metronome to identify the beats per minute of your recorded performance. Listen carefully to how well the clicks line up with the notes you’ve played. Few tests offer better insight into the accuracy of a guitarist’s timing and sense of rhythm.

Recording your performance or practice is a great way to gauge the accuracy of your timing, but it can also prove frustrating and discouraging. Don’t expect perfection when you try this exercise–even session players have difficulty doubling some guitar lines exactly.

Check out the rest of the tips to improve your sense of rhythm and timing here.