How to Practice Bass with a Metronome

On bass, where you put a note counts for as much as which note it is. A metronome is the plainest tool for working on that, and it is easy to use badly: switch it on, play over it, and never check whether you and the click agree.

The exercises below each give you one thing to listen for. None of them needs more than a few minutes, which fits the way our practice routine guide uses the click: for one focused stretch, then off.

Start with one note

Set the click to a comfortable tempo, around 70 BPM, and count along out loud: one, two, three, four. Then play a single note once per click. The A at the 5th fret of the E string will do.

Listen for one thing. When your note lands exactly with the click, the click seems to get quieter, because your note covers it. When you are early or late, you hear two separate sounds close together. Try to make the click disappear for four bars in a row. It is harder than it sounds.

Long notes, and where they end

Slow, long notes show your timing more clearly than fast ones. Bring the click down to 60 BPM and play whole notes: pluck on beat one and hold the note through all four clicks.

Now pay attention to the end of the note as well as the start. First, hold each whole note right up to the next beat one and replace it with a new note, leaving no gap. Then switch to half notes and stop each one exactly on the click of beat three, so you get two beats of sound and two beats of silence. A bass note that ends in time is as much a part of the groove as one that starts in time. Stopping it cleanly is a muting skill as well as a timing one.

Subdivisions: counting between the clicks

Most basslines move faster than the beat. Subdividing means splitting each beat into equal parts and counting the parts, so you always know where you are in the bar.

Quarters    1           2           3           4
Eighths     1     +     2     +     3     +     4     +
Triplets    1   triplet 2   triplet 3   triplet 4   triplet
Sixteenths  1  e  +  a  2  e  +  a  3  e  +  a  4  e  +  a

Say the plus sign as "and". Eighth notes are "one and two and". Triplets are three to a beat: "one-trip-let, two-trip-let". Sixteenth notes are four to a beat: "one-e-and-a".

Leave the metronome clicking quarter notes at 60 to 70 BPM and play one bar of each row on a single note, top to bottom, then back up. The click does not change. You fit two, three or four even notes inside each one. The joins are the hard part, especially the move between eighth notes and triplets. If the in-between notes come out uneven, let the metronome click the subdivision itself for a while, then go back to quarter-note clicks and keep the same evenness on your own.

Put the click on 2 and 4

A click on every beat does a lot of the timekeeping for you. Take half the clicks away and you have to supply the missing beats yourself.

To do it, halve the tempo. For a groove at 80 BPM, set the metronome to 40. Then hear each click as beat two or beat four. The easiest way in is to count out loud in the gaps: say "one" in the silence, hear the click on "two", say "three", hear the click on "four". Once the count feels steady, start playing, with your first note on the silent beat one.

If the clicks slide back to feeling like one and three, stop and count yourself in again. It happens to everyone. If your metronome accents the first beat of the bar, turn the accent off for this exercise, because its "one" is no longer yours.

What "in the pocket" means

Players say a line is in the pocket when every note sits in the same place against the beat, bar after bar, so the rest of the band can lean on it. It has nothing to do with being loud or busy. It comes from the things above: note starts that meet the click, note ends that are placed on purpose, and even subdivisions.

To practice it, take a simple root-and-fifth line or a line you have built from a chord chart, and play it for two minutes without changing anything. No fills, no variations. Holding still is the exercise.

Slow down, then come back up

When a line will not sit, the tempo is too fast for now. Bring the click down until you can play the line cleanly several times in a row with relaxed hands, even if that is far slower than the song. Then raise it a few BPM at a time. If it falls apart, go back one step and stay there a little longer.

Slow practice is not only for hard passages. There is more space between slow clicks, so there is more room to be early or late, and a line you can place at 50 BPM is one you really know.

Any metronome will do all of this. The one in Lazy Lopez: Bass is described in the Metronome guide: it runs from 40 to 240 BPM, sets the tempo by slider, plus and minus buttons or tap-tempo, clicks in quarter notes, eighth notes, triplets or sixteenth notes, and has an accent toggle for beat one that you can leave off for the 2-and-4 exercise. The Grooves tool has a "speed up gradually" toggle that raises the tempo over the course of a loop, which takes care of coming back up. The app is free, with no account and no ads.