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There are three elements of music, there's rhythm, melody and harmony, and to me, the most important

and the oldest element of music is rhythm.

And using a metronome can be a really great way to exercise the rhythm muscle.

Now, Metronome is just a little click that sounds like this.

And that said to 100 beats per minute, you can get a little metronome app on your smartphone, which

works just fine and there's lots of great free options, but I'm using a little called Metronome Tuner

Combo Unit here, which is quite handy.

And, you know, if we have a song that we feel like.

You know, we're struggling to get the changes between the courts to be smooth and maybe the picking

pattern we're working on just feels a little bit stiff.

Taking a metronome and practicing with it is a great thing to do.

But one of the best practices you can adopt as as a musician is slowing that metronome down and working

on playing things cleanly and smoothly and clearly at a slower tempo.

So if we take a little fingerpicking pattern like this.

I want to play that with a metronome and the metronome was going one, two, three, four, if I felt

like, you know, it wasn't quite as smooth or articulate as I wanted, which it never is.

You really have to train yourself to to to play with clarity and articulation in a clean technique,

slowing it down to something like.

Would be a great way to practice that little exercise, and I know it sounds boring and it's no fun

to play really slow, you know, music that requires a lot of concentration.

But deliberate practice is the key to making good progress on our instrument.

And the metronome can be a wonderful, wonderful tool for ironing out the creases in our playing and

making everything connect, sound smooth, sound cohesive.

And and it's also a good reference point of, you know, how fast you can play a song or more importantly,

how slowly you can play a song while still keeping the rhythm smooth and having a nice flow to it.

So I really encourage you to practice with a metronome, especially as we get into the the little finger

picking roles that we're going to go through in this course.

Next up, we're going to talk about how to read a code diagram.