When I was 14 I would have wanted to "shred at 220bpm" but today I wouldn't get my wallet out for that. What I really would pay for is help getting into the pocket.

Anyone who can read a guitar tab can play the notes of "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder. But simply playing the notes against a metronome sounds mechanical -- the song only comes to life when you get the timings right (both the note attack and decay have to be timed for a "swing.") A good swing will practically force your audience to start dancing to your music -- it's magical! But it's very difficult to learn because regular metronome practice won't achieve it.

If you're measuring "rush and drag" against a straight metronome, could you also measure against a swung time, perhaps against timings extracted from in-the-pocket songs we know and love?

▲ lblack00 a day ago | parent [-]

> When I was 14 I would have wanted to "shred at 220bpm" but today I wouldn't get my wallet out for that.

That's fair, essentially why I put "shred" in quotes originally is that shredding guitar isn't necessarily playing fast. You laid out a nice example with Superstition for that.

I don't see why that couldn't be implemented in some way (accenting specific notes and different sustain times).

What would be difficult is quantifying note attack exactly for XYZ's riff sections. I.e., what constitutes a relative baseline pick attack and the target pick attack. If we are using a float and define the "normal" attack as 0.5, then how do we know, for example, the first or fifth note in the iconic Superstition riff is 0.85? Is it empirical?

Either way, that is a lovely insight I will consider. Matching another guitarist's intonation down to a tee can be extremely difficult, but very rewarding.

▲ elevation 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> What would be difficult is quantifying note attack exactly for XYZ's riff sections.

At 60 BPM, mathematical quarter notes are 1000ms apart. But in a pocket groove, you may notice that every other quarter note is "late", or "swung":

  |o---o---o---o---|  (mathematical)
  |o----o--o----o--|  (swung)

If you load a groovy song in Audacity you should be able to see these inter-note delays.

Another factor that affects rhythm is note duration relative to the tempo -- you'll want to measure that too.

> Matching another guitarist's intonation down to a tee

I suspect if you study a few groovy songs you'll find there's just a slightly different note grid that's common to these songs (there could be more than one grid!) Teaching this grid (rather than teaching one specific song) will help the student learn to shift notes away from the the mathematical metronome placement. This skill will equip many of them to mimic the feel of their favorite artist by ear.

	▲	lblack00 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I see what you mean now. I interpreted note attack as pick attack, which is traditionally defined as how hard a given note is played with a pick. Yeah, swing usually has uneven subdivisions. Funk is almost always syncopated, and depending on the style, can be a mix of syncopation and swing. This goes back to how you noted simply using a metronome will give that mechanical, or even a soulless characteristic, to playing a piece which inherently has a soulful quality about it. And with respect to intonation, there's a lot more that goes into that than just timing it right (how hard fingers are pressed on the fretboard, the pressure between fingers holding the pick, the angle of the pick, where the pick strikes relative to pickups, the pick attack, accenting notes, etc.) I do love this idea of being able to apply some "in the pocket"/"swing" deviation to a metronome sequence. I agree with you that it adds that magical musical quality that people would instinctively dance to.