Timing On Guitar - Playing Your Guitar In Time

Playing guitar in time is one of the most vitally important things you need to learn to do. You can have all the technique in the world and have a great knowledge of the fretboard, but if what you play on the guitar is not in time, then it is all worth nothing.

In a nutshell, timing is knowing WHEN to play your notes on the guitar. You could think of it as the glue that holds everything in the right place.

You are not going to actually pick up your guitar at all in this lesson. However, if you regularly work with the exercises that follow, they will improve your guitar playing in a big way.

Improving your timing on guitar and awareness of the beat is an ongoing thing. I still work on it with my own guitar playing regularly. For me, it’s not just about playing the things I play in time on guitar, but also about becoming more creative with my guitar playing through timing.

In this lesson I want to keep it very simple and work on the following two areas:

1. Keeping time

2. Awareness of the beat

Keeping Time With Your Guitar Playing

The most common time in music is 4/4 time. Simply put, 4/4 time is when you have four even counts or beats in each bar of music.

A “count” or “beat” can be thought of as the same thing, and refers to the 1 2 3 and 4.

Here is how 4/4 time feels:

When you listen to the track above count ALOUD, not in your head,

1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4 etc

and tap or clap to each beat as you count in time.

This is the foundation for playing in time on your guitar. No matter how difficult the music is that you are playing, everything relates back to this (ie. the beat). You need to have a solid foundation with your timing on guitar, and as a result, you will be able to build upon it the music you want to play.

Of course, if everything you ever played on your guitar fell on the beat, it would be very boring and mundane. Lets look at a few common ways we can divide this beat up to further work with your timing on the guitar.

Divided In Two

When the beat is divided into two you count:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + etc

Here is how it sounds:

Divided In Three

When the beat is divided into three you count:

1 + a 2 + a 3 + a 4 + a etc

Here is how it sounds:

Divided In Four

When the beat is divided into four you count:

1 e + a 2 e + a 3 e + a 4 e + a etc

Here is how it sounds:

To get the very best results and really improve your timing with your guitar playing you need to count ALOUD as you tap or clap along with each rhythm above. Your aim is to keep exact time with each track as consistently as possible.

Leave your guitar out of it for now. To develop good timing you need to work on it in isolation to your actual guitar playing.

Increasing Your Awareness Of The Beat When Playing Guitar In Time

Ok, so you have been working on keeping time with some common divisions of the beat. Now I want to go a little further by increasing your awareness of time.

What does that mean exactly?

It means that you can really “feel” where you are in any given bar as you play your guitar in time, or as you listen to music.

To help develop your feel we are going to use accents. An accent simply means to play a particular beat or beats louder than the others. We want these beats to stand out.

Doing this will help your timing on the guitar in a massive way. By accenting certain beats, you will be training yourself to really “feel” where these beats are in the bar.

Here are some examples for you to work with to get you going:

“ > “ = accent

Dividing Beat In Two

> > > >

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

> > > >

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

Mixing up accent:

> > >

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +

Dividing Beat In Three

> > > >

1 + a 2 + a 3 + a 4 + a

> > > >

1 + a 2 + a 3 + a 4 + a

> > > >

1 + a 2 + a 3 + a 4 + a

Mixing up accent:

> > > >

1 + a 2 + a 3 + a 4 + a