Re: Again with the tempo stuff
I like a lot of the exercises that the other people have mentioned so far. I'm someone that had to work very hard to develop a sense of time, it didn't come naturally to me. I like the exercises where you silence some of the beats in a metronome and try to keep time through the silence. I actually made a series of practice click tracks on my computer that start with a normal click and then slowly drop out one quarter note at a time until you're trying to keep time with only the downbeat of every other bar or every three bars. Some guys go higher than that, that's crazy hard.
There's one other exercise that helped me out a ton. Put a click on very slowly (like 55 bpm) and then on a practice pad try to play first quarter notes directly along with it, then switch to eighth notes, then eighth note triplets, then sixteenth notes, then quintuplets, then sextuplets, then groups of seven (septituplets, I guess?), then 32nd notes, then work your way back down. Essentially you keep adding one more note that you're trying to fit in to one beat of pulse from the metronome, and you're trying to be able to switch from one subdivision to the next in perfect time, right off the bat. It's actually WAY harder than it sounds to make each change without rushing or dragging the first few notes, particularly in the odd groupings. It helped me out a lot in getting a more internal sense of time.
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