I’m posting this just because I searched the forums and didn’t find anyone discussing it and it is, in my opinion, the most important kind of metronome practice.
For me personally there are two distinct kinds of metronome practice:
Practice in which youre training yourself like a dog to do movements on cue
AND
Metronome practice where you’re actually playing like you would play in a performance situation
I think the first one is what most people in this group are doing. It’s one that I had abandoned for years but coming to this site has encouraged me to bring it back. In this first type of practice you want the click on every beat. If I’m practicing Gilbert sixes trying to push my tempo I want the click on every beat. I’m trying to make it so that each click equals one motion in my head. Click = play all 6 notes evenly spaced
and then there is another click and repeat the pattern and if we’re doing it right then that lines up again. To me, this kind of practice is chunking in a really pure form. I’m trying to think of each click as a chunk.
However, there is another kind of metronome practice that is basically the only way they do it in bluegrass and jazz! Cut the bpm in half, and count the clicks as 2 and 4. This means that the 1 (and 3) of each beat isn’t going to come from the metronome; it’s going to come from your internal sense of time. It also means that you’re playing along to an accompaniment that actually sounds musical and is fun to interact with. Doing this kind of practice with jazz ballads or Stoner metal is awesome for your sense of time. If you’re playing at 60 BPM and only getting a click on 2 and 4 it means you’re only getting a click every two seconds. If you’re playing bluegrass at 280 BPM that means you have an awesome double time pulse to dial into.
There are a lot of benefits to this kind of practice which will be immediately apparent once you try it. It really forces you to be accountable for feel and time in a very fundamental way. After doing this for a while, playing with another musician will feel very different. The pulse will just be an automatic thing that you can take for granted and interact with however you want instead of something you have to be constantly aware of
There is one other kind of metronome practice which has been super useful to me but I would consider “extra.” An excellent guitar player named Lage Lund suggests cutting even more beats just as an exercise in being accountable for the time. For example, setting the metronome so that it only clicks on only the 2 of each measure. Making a metronome so that it clicks on 1 then 4 then 3 then 2 then repeats. Making a metronome that clicks once every other measure on 2 or 4 etc
I hope this is useful to someone!