Hi, how're you doing? Justin here.
In this video today we're gonna be checking out my new app
which is the Justinguitar Time Trainer Metronome.
It is a metronome - but it's got a whole heap more to it.
It's got three training tools which are gonna really help you develop
your own internal sense of time.
Now I'm gonna give you the quick spill about them now
for those who don't wanna sit through the whole ten minute explanation.
There's three training modes.
The first one is called "Bar Breaks"
which basically stops the beat for a bar or more
which is a great rhythm guitar development tool.
So you'll be playing along for three bars with the click
and then it's gonna stop for a bar,
you have to keep time and then be playing perfectly in sync
when the beat starts again.
For one bar it's not too bad but two, three, four bars is getting harder,
up to eight bars, that's gonna be a real tough one.
Mainly I use it for rhythm guitar
but you can use it for scales or to improv or solo guitar - whatever.
It's a really good one for developing that kind of your own internal sense of time
which is a really, really important thing to develop.
Second training tool is the "Random Beat Drop".
A lot of guys get, when they're playing with the metronome a lot,
really rely on that click to be playing in time.
So what this one does is gradually and slowly and randomly start muting the metronome clicks.
And you'll find it when you're practicing along with it,
you gradually get used to the metronome not being there.
It's kind of removing the safety blanket slowly.
Great one for doing with your scales as well.
So, you know, you should be practicing with a normal metronome, too, on my app.
That is really important.
We've got one of those built into this of course but
the "Random Beat Drops" are really a good kind of,
you know, it gets you out of just really religiously always playing with the metronome, you know,
- which is a very important skill.
And the third one, which is one that I've wanted in a metronome for years and years,
I've called it the "Speed-Upper" which basically is:
start tempo and end tempo and a duration
and it's gonna gradually speed up from one tempo to the next tempo
over the course of that five minutes or whatever.
You can go from 80 to 100 or whatever
which is a really, really, super-dooper useful thing for your practice time.
You know, I'm using it everyday for my own practice as well.
It's a great thing.
Of course, it is a full-featured metronome as well.
We have accents, a few different sounds, tap tempo
and our audio engine is extremely accurate.
Most of the apps that I've seen around are not very accurate at all.
In fact, some of them shouldn't really be even for sale, I think,
'cause they're probably damaging more than help you by playing along with them.
The beats were all over the place
and some of the tempos were completely mislabeled as well.
So you think that you're going along with 140
and you're actually going at about 110 or something.
It can be pretty drastic.
So just be careful with that.
I'm not trying to do the big sale on my one
but my one works and if you do decide to go for a different one
I'd do a little bit of checking-up to make sure
that it's working good and that it's accurate, too.
So, now we're gonna go to a close-up
and I'm gonna show you all of the features
and how to use this thing.
I hope you enjoy it.
It's available from the Appstore
and, as I said, from the Android Store some time very soon.
OK, here we go for an in-depth look at the Justinguitar Time Trainer Metronome.
We start, of course, by clicking on that little icon,
quick splash screen and we're onto the main page
which has the little swinging metronome head-thing,
the pendulum, the little bit grill behind will light up with the beat.
Next line down we've got the tempo which is in beats per minute.
The minus button, of course, will slow the tempo
and the plus button will increase the tempo.
Something slightly...there's obviously...
just pressing and holding will move in increments of ten
from whatever you want.
So it can be usefull if you're trying to change tempo quickly.
We've got a mute button.
Pretty obvious, it's gonna make the metronome silent when you hit that.
And underneath here we've got a volume control
which is a volume slider.
It's also controllable by using the plus and minus volume buttons
on the actual iPod itself - or iPhone or whatever it is that you're using.
We're gonna leave the Trainer just for a second.
We've got over here a tap tempo.
Very, very useful when you're trying to figure out the speed of a song.
If you literally just start tapping that:
Each time you tap, it's gonna be doing an average of the taps that you've done.
So we've just covered that one with 97
if we hit play it should be more or less the same tempo
which is a really great feature when you're trying to work out stuff
you know, trying to work out a tune or whatever.
It's a really important feature.
Underneath that we've got the accent.
So, accent is controling a louder or slightly different note
to let you know where you are in the bar.
So, in normal playing you're gonna be in 4/4
which is gonna give you an accent on beat 1 -
2,3,4, 1,2,3,4...
You can hear, it's just a slightly different note.
Now, if you are playing in 5/4, you just hit that once to make the accent 5.
Anything to do with 3, you'd move it down-
sorry, I'm having trouble touching the right thing
'cause I'm looking at it from kinda behind
but anyway, there we go - so if we've got it on 3:
1,2,3...
We've got a little waltz thing going on, right?
So, that's the accent control.
Now all of this is changeable in the settings.
So if you click the little top icon there
you've got a range of different sounds,
the default sound we were just listening to,
MPC, cowbell, more cowbell and wood.
And you can also independently control the volume of the beat
and the volume of the accent.
So, that's a really useful thing to be able to do as well.
Now, the big thing with this is the "Time Trainer", it's the training modes.
If we hit the "training mode" we get a little training mode menu options.
So, we've got "trainer off", of course
and we've got "Bar Breaks", "Random Beat Drop" and the "Speed-Upper".
So we're gonna start with "Bar Breaks"
which is probably the most useful, I think,
of the three that I'm using a lot still
and have been using for many years just in another way, using ProTools.
We hit the "edit" button and we have the kind of most important settings
that you can use for these "Bar Breaks".
The first thing is "bars solid at start".
Now, whenever you're gonna be making the metronome silent for a while
or you're having a bar break,
you really wanna make sure, at the beginning of the exercise
that you got a good number of bars to get yourself in the groove properly
and that you're feeling the tempo well.
So at least four bars I would suggest as a "bars solid at start"-setting.
We've got "random mute off" for the trainer,
I'll explain that in a second.
then we've got "bars solid" and "bars muted".
Now, this is a good default setting for you if you're starting off with this.
It's gonna be playing the metronome as normal for three bars
and then it's going to mute the metronome for one bar
and come back in again for three bars solid, then muted for one bar.
So, it gives you a chance to get in the groove
and then it's gonna be muted and you've gotta try
and stay in time so when the metronome comes back in
you're perfectly synchronised with the click.
This is a great exercise.
Really, really solid thing to be doing.
It'll help your internal time a lot.
There's also "random bar mute".
If you select that as being on, you can then select a random bar mute percentage.
So if you click on that you might have,
say, 50% which would mean that half of the bars are going to be randomly muted.
That might mean you get two in a row and then one or three in a row
and then a couple on and a couple off
'cause it's random. It's not on/off/on/off.
But I don't recommend you use that to start off with.
I think as a good starting setting
you want the "bars solid" at three, "bars muted" at one
and the "bars solid at start" set to four.
You go back from here now.
When you leave this one to go back to the thing,
if you've changed anything, you wanna hit the "done" button,
not the "back" button.
That's really important, otherwise your settings won't work.
So, I'm gonna turn the tempo right up here for a second
just so you can clearly hear what's going on.
And then we hit play, we'll have four bars solid, then three bars solid
one bar off, three bars solid, one bar off.
So here we go,play: 1,2,3,4, 2,2,3,4, 3,2,3,4, 4,2,3 ...
now here: 1,2,3,4, 2,2,3,4, 3,2,3,4, stop, 2,3,4
1..., 2..., 3..., stop,2,3,4, 1...
...and then you're back on again.
You can see what it's doing then.
Now at that speed the break wasn't very long
but you can imagine that at a normal speed or at a lot slower
that that break is gonna feel a lot longer than that and especially...
One bar, you shouldn't have too many problems with, two bars is a little bit more tricky,
as soon as you get above four bars, it can be quite difficult.
So I'm hoping that you'll enjoy that kinda challenge when you get to that.
So that's the first of the training modes.
The second one: "Random Beat Drop".
A lotta guitar players really struggle when the metronome click's not there.
They got really used to it.
When really the metronome should be guiding you on your tempo
you shouldn't be kinda chasing it or waiting for it, you know?
So what you should...the idea with this one is that
a certain percentage of the beats, they're gonna just completely disappear.
So this is a kinda of a good starting setting.
So we've got a gradual interval of five minutes
and gradual is turned on, of course.
So over the course of five minutes it's gonna start with 100% on
and then gradually up to 30% of the beats are gonna disappear.
Now, just for the point of this little demo here, I'm gonna select it as being one minute.
and I'm gonna turn the beats muted up to 90%
just so you can really hear what's going on here.
If we go back and "done", 'cause we've changed stuff and then hit play:
1,2,3,4 ...,2,3,4 ....,2,3,4
So, a lot of them are there to start off with
but over the course of one minute, more and more of them are disappearing
and the idea would be that you keep playing your scale through this
and keep managing 'cause when those clicks do happen
you should be perfectly synchronised with them.
It's a really, really great fun exercise.
Cause especially in this 90%-kinda target area it does get pretty difficult, you know?
But that's the whole point.
If it would be easy, it wouldn't be a very good game, would it?
So, that's the "Random Beat Drop" training tool.
And this last one: The "Speed-Upper".
Now, this one's pretty obvious.
We got a start tempo, an end tempo and the practice duration.
So, most times you gonna be practicing five minutes.
Again I'm gonna just drop it down to one minute now
just to show you the exercise.
And usually, if I was practicing for five minutes, 60 to 90 might be a reasonable kind of a jump to make.
If you're right at the top of your performance level
it might be 80 to 90 or whatever, you know?
I'm gonna make it a bit more extreme again
just for this demo here.
Let's all make it up to 140, let's say,
over one minute. So we've selected that. "Done".
So we're gonna start at 60, end up at 140, over a minute.
which is, like I said, rather extreme.
You'll see, when I hit play now, the tempo is gonna go down . We've lost our plus and minus buttons
because we're in this "Speed-Upper" training mode.
We hit play, started at 60.
Now, it's not going up every bar, it's going up mathematically
over the time period that you set which in this case was a minute.
You can see, it's already picking up because we've gotta get all of the way up to 140
or whatever it was that I set and you get the idea.
This is really great for working on your scales or arpeggios or anything really
that you've gotta try and get faster and faster.
I wouldn't recommend doing it this extreme.
That's kinda bad really to be honest.
You're much more likely to be going from, you know,
100 to 110 or something along those kinda lines
but you get the idea anyway.
It's a very, very useful little training tool.
And of course, if you hit the iButton down in the bottom corner there
you have the full instructions.
All of the stuff that I'm just have been going through with you there.
Now, how to make the most of each one of those different training tools
and a bit about playing with the metronome.
How it's best to do that and some links to the forum and other kinda useful things like that.
So, all of the info is built into the app.
Well, I hope you enjoyed having a look at that.
Remember there's plenty much more information and support at justinguitar.com.
You'll find the applications in the products area - the online store.
So, I'll see you for a lesson or something like that very soon.
Take care of yourselves, bye-bye.