How to Use a Metronome for Guitar Practice (8 Examples with Exercises)

Practicing Guitar with a metronome is an essential skill if you wish to take your guitar playing from your bedroom and onto a stage.

The ability to play an instrument in time makes you sound good, entertains the audience, fellow musicians take you seriously and brings tons of youtube fans!

In this article, I’ll show you the right way of using a metronome for guitar practice. Exercises you can apply to different guitar techniques you wish to master and a step by step guide to get you started.

If you’ve been unsure of how to use a metronome effectively, follow along this article and pick the exercise and skill you wish to work on.

Metronome Basics for Guitar Practice

Before we begin, let’s quickly look at a few basics of a metronome. I’m using the Pro Metronome app available on both Apple and Android platforms. I recommend you download it if you haven’t already or you may use a metronome of your choice.

There are three features of metronome you must know before you start practicing with one. These 3 are common across all metronomes – digital or mechanical.

1. Tempo: Also called BPM (beats per minute) is the speed of the pulse or the beat that plays at equal intervals. Higher the number, faster the tempo.
2. Time Signature (or T.S.): Typically written as a fraction or as two numbers stacked on one another. The number on the top tells you the number of beats in one musical barr (or measure). And the number on the bottom tells which note (whole, half, quarter, eighth or sixteenth) gets one beat. For beginners, 4/4 is the best T.S. to start with.
3. Sub Division: Is a musical term that uses music notes to show how each beat is divided within a measure. Set it to a quarter note as shown in the image above.

Rhythm Fundamentals

The image below shows how each music note is interpreted given a time signature. Of course there are many other elements such as rests, ties etc., but here we’ll stick to the basics. Please take your time to get familiar with these since all exercises depend on your ability to understand rhythm basics.

How To Use Rhythm Elements For Practice

Pick any technique below and first learn it well so that you don’t need to refer to the tab while practicing. Once you’ve memorized the exercise, start practicing by playing whole notes and progress only when you can play the notes clearly and without mistakes.

Do not worry about speed. Ignore speed and focus on accuracy. Speed will come with time and practice.

Refer to the step by step guide at the end of the article for detailed instructions.

Now let’s look at 8 different examples of how you can use a metronome to practice and master different skills on Guitar.

1. Play Chords In Time

Rhythm is the essence of music and rhythm is built on time. This is one of the most important skill area that every guitarist must nail down. 

Here’s a simple exercise with three chords, G, C, D.

Start at a comfortable tempo of 80 bpm or lower and play down strums on every beat. Your goal is to strum right with the beat, not before not after. 

Once comfortable, you may either increase the tempo or strum twice on every beat (eighth note). As you get comfortable try different strumming patterns over the same chords or other set of chords. You can also take chords of your favorite songs and practice over them with a metronome.

2. Change Chords Faster

You can use the metronome to improve and make your chord changes faster. 

Changing chords in time with the tempo of the music trains you to play a variety of songs, especially those at a faster tempo – think U2’s Desire.

Pick two of the three chords from the above notations, say G and D. Set the tempo at 30 bpm and start by playing the G chord.  

Play once every four clicks (whole note). Change to D. Now play D in a similar manner and change. Keep your strumming hand moving like a pendulum while you make the change.

Once you can play comfortably, change to playing once every two clicks (half note) and so on. Apply it to different strumming patterns and so on.

If you’re a beginner, target to play quarter notes at 40 bpm. As you progress, you can increase the tempo.

Just 5 minutes a day of chord change practice with a metronome will do wonders to your rhythm guitar skills.

Use this exercise along with the one above for any song you wish to learn.

3. Improve Alternate Picking for Lead Guitar

Alternate Picking is one of the foundational techniques for guitarists – ‘must have’ for lead guitarists. Accuracy with alternate picking should help set the foundation for other advanced right hand techniques.

Start with the easiest scale of all  – the minor pentatonic scale.

The tab below is in the key of Am and is the first pattern out of the five. Start slow at 60 bpm, playing down and up each time you play a note. If playing quarter notes is too fast for you, start by playing one note every two clicks (half note) and then move to quarter notes.

You should later move to playing twice for every click (eighth note) followed by playing four times for every click (sixteenth notes) depending you what stage you’re at in your guitar playing journey.

Practicing alternate picking is not limited to playing the above scale. You can and must use it in all other scales and patterns you learn.

4. Memorize Scale Shapes

As a lead guitarist, knowing just one box pattern can help you play. But that’s not why you picked up the guitar. You want to be able to play leads and solos all over the fretboard, just like your guitar hero.

To be able to do that effectively, memorize the scale pattern. There are tons of scale patterns in music. Here’s D Major Scale in Shape/Pattern C as per the CAGED System.

Practicing a scale pattern with a metronome not only helps you code the pattern in your memory but also makes for comfortable playing in different parts of the fretboard.

But remember:

The goal of learning scales is to make music with it. Don’t just memorize tons of scale patterns. It won’t do any good. Learn one scale and make music with it over a backing track before learning another.

5. Learn Melodic Intervals

Playing a scale up and down hardly sounds musical. The object of learning a scale shape is to make music with it. There are many musical ideas you need to learn to be able to make a decent solo.

One such idea is music intervals. All music is nothing but a structured placement of music intervals.

Some of the best solos we’ve heard use a melodic interval pattern. 

Melodic interval is nothing but creating a melody by using one or more music intervals.

These melodic intervals can be used to spice up your guitar solos. For example, one of the most common interval patterns that you can play is the thirds (major third interval). 

It means you take a major scale and play a pattern of notes in a sequence – play a note, skip a note, play a note, skip a note and so on.

Since chords (major and minor) are built on the interval of thirds, getting your fingers used to finding the interval pattern not only helps you break out of a scale rut but also helps in developing new, melodic ideas for your solos.

Similar to thirds, you can play a scale in other intervals such as seconds, fourths, fifths and so on. 

Learning and practicing scales in intervals is a better method to mastering scales than playing them up and down.

Tabs for practicing the major scale in intervals.

6. Practice Licks & Solos

As beginners, we want to jump learning and playing our favorite solos right away. However, when trying to play over a backing track, you feel somethings not right. Well, you guessed it right. You’re not in time with the beat.

You need to break the solo down into it’s its individual licks or take each bar of the tab and learn and practice it slowly and speeding up only once you can play accurately at a slower tempo. And a metronome is a perfect tool for that.

Learning even a simple Guitar solo such the one in Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit will take time.

Depending on what you want to play, a lick may be made up of several musical elements. Take a look at the one below.

There is no way you’ll play in time with the rest of the band if you haven’t practiced these licks over a metronome over and over again. Metronome teaches you the discipline to hit the beat every time.

If you wish to sound like you know what you’re doing, practice your licks or solos over a metronome and you’ll notice the difference.

Here’s a simple lick you can try your hand at. It has eighth note rhythm and two whole-step bends.

Practicing licks with a metronome will also improve your sense of time and rhythm skills.

15 Easy to Difficult Guitar Licks With Tabs (Don’t forget to add some distortion while you’re at it 😉

7. Practice Triads & Arpeggios

Get upto speed with basic music theory concepts before trying these techniques. 

Triads are chords that are made up of 3 unique notes. C Major is made of C, E and G notes and A Minor is made of A, C and E notes and so on.

And when you play the notes one after another, you are playing an arpeggio or an arpeggiated triad.

Knowledge of triads is an essential skill for advancing beginners and intermediate guitarists. Learning to play triads will open up the fretboard for you and you can play your solos without worrying about scale box patterns.

Here’s a really nice, beginner friendly lesson on triad that you may want to try out.

Similar to other exercises, begin slowly by playing whole notes (one note for every four metronome clicks) and progress from there.

8. Improve Your Fretboard Knowledge

If you wish to jailbreak from box patterns in playing your solos or beginner cowboy open chords, you’ll need to memorize notes on the fretboard. 

This is a non-negotiable guitar knowledge for those looking to explore their creative potential with the instrument.

There are countless benefits to learning all the notes on the fretboard. 

Some of these include being able to apply music theory to the guitar, play chords and scales all over the neck, transpose songs to a different key, better improvisation and so much more.

A simple exercise of memorizing notes on the fretboard is to set the metronome tempo to 60 bpm, and play the note A on each string for every click. If this proves hard, start by playing the whole note (one note every 4 clicks).

Once you can find note A all over the fretboard comfortably, you can try with other natural notes as well as chromatics.

There are many ways you can approach memorizing the fretboard. The one below by Blues Guitarist and teacher, Ross Campbell helped me get my fretboard knowledge sorted.

What to do Next?

If you’re a beginner and have never really tried practicing with a metronome here’s a step by step approach I suggest:

Step 1: Download the Pro Metronome app, an app of your choice or visit an online metronome webpage. 

Step 2: Start with Alternate Picking technique from the list above to start your practice.

Step 3: Learn the tab by playing very slowly to memorize the notes and pattern.

Step 4: Set your metronome at 60 bpm, time signature at 4/4.

Step 5: Now play the exercise as whole notes. Meaning, play each note once every four clicks of the metronome.

Step 6: Once you can play comfortably without making a mistake 5 times in a row, switch to playing half notes (i.e. play one note every 2 metronome clicks).

Step 7. Use the same rule as given in step # 6 to level up to playing quarter notes (play a note for every metronome click).

Step 8: Once you can play quarter notes comfortably without mistakes, increase metronome speed by 10 bpm. If 10 bpm is too fast, increase by 5 bpm and so on.

Step 9: After you can play quarter notes at 120 bpm, reduce metronome tempo to 60 bpm and play eighth notes (play two notes for every metronome click)

Step 10: Do the same as step # 8 and 9 to switch to playing sixteenth notes (play 4 notes for every metronome click).

It may seem overwhelming at first but it’s not. 

In a few weeks you’ll notice a significant improvement in your time and ability to play with the beat. Hope the step by step instruction helps you with your practice. 

Now go grab that Guitar, start now and good luck.