Practicing the curriculum: Finding the tempo of a song

Here's a question I received via email about about practicing slowly, specifically how to find the tempo of a song so you can set your metronome or time keeping device.

"Good morning. I went through the common practice mistakes video you posted. How do I determine the bpm for a song I practice, like Rumble?"

Good question.    We’ll work on each of these ideas in lesson but to find the tempo of a song:

1) Ask me    :-)
 

2) Find reliable sheet music like what we can get at Guitar Center.  I can help with that as well.
 

3) Use a metronome to help match the tempo of the song.  I can show you how to do this efficiently.  Many digital metronomes have a tap tempo feature that allows you to manually find it by tapping the metronome on the beat. It’s okay if you are not exactly matching the speed, close is good enough and you likely be slowing it down anyway.   Also, we will have some backing tracks to help with that.   

At the moment we are using YouTube’s playback speed feature to slow the songs down where needed.  Rumble is pretty slow, that is why I chose it, but if you are having trouble with the change to B7 for example, stop the recording, change the chords 5-7 times, and run it again.    If you are having trouble with the Em Pentatonic scale run, stop recording and work it separately until you can get that part up to speed.   

It may take a few weeks or even months to get completely used to doing this but once you are familiar with the routine it will go much smoother.

Have fun!

-Blake