Rhythm can be a very big or intimidating subject, but in fact if you break it down to its components, it’s quite simple. It’s really a question of timing and speed.

Now, we also talked about tapping your foot and other things that you can do to kind of keep a strong beat. In this lesson we’re going to talk about using the metronome, which is a tool that kind of helps us keep a beat.

In the last lesson we were working with our metronome, and in this lesson we actually want to develop that and start talking about strumming patterns. And the mechanics of strumming and what strumming really means to most guitar players.

In our last lesson we were dealing with some strumming techniques, and we were also using the metronome to practice those techniques. In this lesson we want to teach you some new exercises that you can use with the metronome, and these are really designed to strengthen your internal rhythmic clock.

We want to take a minute to summarize some of the various things that we’ve been saying in the past few lessons, in particular rhythm. Rhythm is super important in music, if you think about what we’re doing here when we play the guitar there’s kind of really three things.