I cannot play on time. Not in terms of missing beats, or losing the click in the middle of a song, but in that my timing is almost always off. I compared my played notes to the click in the DAW, and I’m usually rushing, sometimes by 30-40ms. I remember Adam Neely said once that 10ms is barely acceptable, so yeah.
I tried dividing the distance between clicks in my head, doubling the metronome tempo, moving with the beat, consciously conpensating for the rush, nothing helped. Therefore, my questions - how’s your timing doing? What can I do to improve mine?
We must be fundamentally different kinds of guitar players. Timing? Metronome? 10 millisecond delay? Why are you trying to perfectly copy someone else’s music when you could be arranging your own novel collections of frequencies? Why formalize your art or restrain playful acts of spontanious whimsy.
When I play the timing comes from what feels right and sounds good.
Each practice session my goal is to discover a new chord or a new way to piece the strumming and harmonic frequencies together in a way that I never have before, sometimes intentionally breaking rhythm speed just to experience a drastic shift or see how it affects the mood.
Fuck time signatures and fuck musical notation, creative musical types are better off staying far away from them lest their imagination becomes caged by formality and law.
why should we practice anything or attempt to be more technically competent at all? have you considered that OP wants their own playing to be more on-beat? It’s a part of general musicianship. It’s one thing to choose to play-off beat for an effect, but it’s another thing to not be able to play on beat when you want to.
by all means you do you, but honestly shut the fuck up with musical notation being detrimental to creativity. Arrogant dunning-kruger bullshit.
I used to think like that and it only caged my ability to get better at functionally playing and understating music for the majority of my playing life.
I wish I’d sought out lessons and theory years ago because in the last two years or so it has exploded my playing so much recently started a band.
Theory helps. Getting better at rhythm helps. What doesn’t help is being closed minded to avenues of improvement.
All that to say, though, don’t get too hung up on one thing at a time. Keep playing music you love and you’ll improve. Also, PLAY WITH OTHER PEOPLE! Or a backing track if that’s not possible for whatever reason. Your timing and musicianship will improve.
from context it sounds like you agree with me. did you reply to the wrong person?