Hey there,
I guess I am a simple case: I am trying to learn a decent USX motion. When doing this at not too slow speeds on a single string, like 150 or more, it’s not really difficult. It feels natural, it feels smooth, there’s no tension at all. A problem arises, however, when I go down to the area between 100 and 120. Now, I am pretty sure that I don’t do string hopping then (I filmed myself and I don’t tense up either). But still, something is wrong. It feels awkward, and especially the upstrokes seem to be, I don’t know, “wobbly”.It is as if I don’t really have control then. It’s not even, it’s not smooth. And for some reason the motion is very small (maybe because I belong to a generation that was taught to minimise motions back in the 80s).
So I had this idea. I would like to have a (midi?) click track starting at 180 bpm or so for 4 bars, then going down to 178 bpm for 4 bars, then going down… and so on, ending on 80 bpm or so. And, of course, a click track doing exactly the opposite. I think this might help me to pinpoint where exactly my hands goes berzerk.
Now, would anyone of you by any chance have a click track like that? Or know an app that can do that?
Thanks in advance and sorry for my poor English (I’m not a native)!
SE
Hello.
This can be done fairly easily in most DAWs. Something like Ableton free version can do it.
YouTube has accelerating metronomes, which may help you?
Or perhaps this decelerating YT metronome?
You will likely enjoy @milehighshred 's free book on metronome practice (here) and figure this out, but if I’m not mistaken, your current metronome should suffice. For example, try it at 60bpm, and if it’s great, 70bpm, and so forth, and in a few minutes you’ll presumably start to see where things get strange, and then can start changing the speed by smaller increments. Good luck, I’m curious to see how you end up resolving this issue!
There are definitely metronome apps that can change speed after some number of bars for practice like the kind that you’re thinking of, one is called Pro Metronome (and it’s in the Apple and possibly Google app stores).
I used to use a software metronome that you could program to slowly increase (or decrease, I suppose) every X number of bars or seconds. It wasn’t this, but this was the first google hit I got for something similar and this would probably work well:
Apart from even simple apps for your smartphone, if you want something more elaborate the easiest thing I could think of is creating new project in your DAW and automating speed. You can make it gradually change tempo back and forth, make some jumps, change time signatures and what not.
If you want to use it offline, I guess you could program some midi beat in that project, either some VST drums, or short notes with piano/synth/whatever to emulate your metronome beats and just render it to mp3 or whatever.
Thank you all of you, I appreciate your messages a lot, they were very helpful! No let’s see if I can get the motion right trying to practise that way… :-/…
the Tempo app does that elegantly & easily. iOS & Android. The Best Metronome App (for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch)