One of the key fundamentals with any music and any instrument is timing and it doesn’t matter what you’re playing, if it’s not in perfect time then it sounds amateur and somewhat annoying for the listener. If you have ever struggled in the past with guitar timing then you may find these ‘guitar solo in time tips’ useful, and hopefully instantly applicable to your playing.
There are two main avenues we can look at in terms of timing, and they are external and internal influences. External influences focus on what is outside of you; things like your guitar setup and the picking action itself, the things that physically go into making the sound. Internal influences come into the category of how you think, hear and structure the notes before they are played. With these two areas in mind, here are some things to think about to get ‘machine like’ timing in everything you play!
Thinking about the Beat – Internally, how you process what you hear makes all the difference. I can guarantee you that you and I could be hearing the same beat but creating different tunes in our mind to play over it, and this matters with timing because you need to hear the accents and where the main notes need to land. If you have a basic 4:4 beat and you are playing a scale over it, the scale will consist of notes in between the beats as well as notes that land dead on the beat. Even if you don’t hear a physical beat you need to learn how to imagine it’s there, as this is what timing is all about – picking where the beat should be and landing dead on it (this is how a solo guitarist can play with no accompaniment and sound good, because the beat is in his/her mind).
Following a specific beat – There are two main ways to physically create a beat to play to; use a metronome and get an instant timing you can play to, or take a little longer and set up a drum machine or drum software. Either way is fine and will do the immediate job at hand, but the advantages of the drum machine are that you feel more inspired because it’s playing real music, and you can have snare accents for example to help create odd timings and different feels. On the other hand metronomes are cheap to buy (there are even free ones online). Also, if you do get a chance to play with a drummer do it. There’s something that happens with your playing when playing with a real drummer, you become more accountable and are almost forced to become better, especially with your timing.
Pick Attack and Timing – This is the third area to control after the external and internal timing. Pick attack simply means the speed and consistency that the pick strikes the string. If you are playing a basic chord progression and are ‘strumming’ to just get a relaxed feel then you can have a very loose hand while playing the notes as timing will be a bit more forgiving. If you’re playing a guitar solo or anything with single notes or with more speed, then this needs to sharpen up and as a general rule – the faster you play the tighter your picking action needs to become. When playing guitar solos there is a focus on picking the note fast (even if the sequence is slow) to get an immediate and clean sound from the note, and only then can you add your chosen technique to it.
It’s a very handy thing for guitarists who want to learn lead or solo work to first think about the rhythm and groove of the song. Only when you get the feel from that side of things can you add to it with a solo because solos are not usually stand alone pieces, they are enhanced and structured by what’s underneath them (even if it’s not physically played).
As you can see from these guitar solo in time tips, timing comes from a few aspects of the sound, and if you learn to first hear it and then play exactly to it (practicing slowly and evenly at first) then your timing will improve dramatically in a short space of time, and just imagine what happens when you speed it all up?
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