Practice guides / Guitar

Metronome practice for guitar

By Gabriel Serwas · Updated 22 August 2026

On guitar the click usually exposes the picking hand first and the chord hand second. If you only “play the riff with a metronome”, you train whichever hand is already early. Isolate the late part, then put the riff back together.

Find which hand is late

Set SixtyBPM to 60 BPM, 4/4, quarter-note beat, Click sound. Mute the strings with the left hand and alternate-pick open-string eighths (two notes per click) for one minute. Then freeze the right hand in a repeating down-down-down-down pattern and change between two left-hand shapes on beat 1.

• If the muted picking drifts, the problem is pick depth or upstroke volume. Do not add chords yet.
• If the picking is steady but the chord lands after beat 1, the left hand is stealing time from the downbeat. Keep the strumming hand moving through the change.

Open-string picking at 60

Play open D, one bar of quarters, one bar of eighths, one bar of sixteenth bursts (two beats only). Upstrokes should match downstrokes in volume. If they do not, stay here. Speed will not balance a weak upstroke; it will hide it until the first gig.

String crossing: loop D and G strings as eighths. The failure point is almost always the first note after the cross. Make that note the downbeat of a new two-bar loop so the click marks the danger, not the easy string.

Worked change: G to C

This is the change that dumps beginners off the beat because both hands want to pause.

1. Strum G for a full bar of four clicks. The right hand does not stop.
2. On the next beat 1, C must already be formed. If it is not, you left G too late.
3. Anticipate: on beat 4 of the G bar, start moving the left hand. The right hand still plays beat 4 on G (or a muted ghost if the chart allows).
4. Three clean cycles. Then add a third chord (G–C–D) only if beat 1 is still early rather than late.

If you need more grid, switch the beat unit to eighths at the same 60 BPM instead of jumping to 120. You want more clicks, not a faster song.

Strumming ghosts

Keep quarter-note clicks. The hand still travels on the “and” whether you strike the strings or not. Count “1 and 2 and”. Ghost strokes that collapse are why acoustic strumming rushes into choruses: the hand path shortens when you get excited.

Drill: four bars of all downstrokes on the click, four bars of down-up eighths, four bars of a pattern you actually use (for example down, down-up, up-down-up). Same tempo. If the pattern cannot survive 60, it will not survive the chorus.

Palm mute as a timing test

Mute and open versions of the same riff should share a downbeat. If the muted version is late, the mute is too heavy; you are waiting for the string to speak. Lighten the palm until beat 1 matches the open version, then restore the mute colour without restoring the delay.

12-bar blues session

Use this when you want repertoire instead of drills. Shuffle feel: 4/4, 60 BPM, and you play the swing eighths yourself against a straight quarter click. Do not set the metronome to triplets until the form is obvious.

1. Two choruses: only downbeats, roots only.
2. Two choruses: shuffle eighths, still roots.
3. Two choruses: a simple turnaround. If beat 1 of bar 11 is late, loop bars 11–12.
4. Last chorus: click on 2 and 4 only (set 1/1 if you need to kill the accent, and tap a backbeat yourself), or mute the click for 8 bars and un-mute on the turnaround.

Odd-meter guitar parts (5/4 intros, 7/8 riffs) belong in the odd time-signature guide, not in this blues loop.

10-minute daily guitar click

1. 2 min muted alternate picking.
2. 3 min the chord change that actually fails on Sunday.
3. 3 min the riff with a 5 BPM ramp, three-clean-reps gate.
4. 2 min one song section, then stop and write the failed beat.