-
Hi Kenji,
I’d be curious to see if there were any patterns or themes in terms of these rhythmic inconsistencies too. In terms of where they happen, whether it’s in rests or longer notes, or (depending on your instrument) if it might be related to string crossings, etc.
I do think the pulse strategy will help lots as you get increasingly comfortable with it (have you listened to Erik Ralske’s podcast interview? He talks about this a good bit).
But also, I’m not sure how you practice with a metronome, but there’s a big difference between learning to synchronize your playing to an external source, and cultivating a stronger internal pulse, and “normal” metronome practice tends not to help as much with the latter. There are two metronome apps that I’m aware of – Time Guru and Tonal Energy – that have an essential feature known as random beat silencing. This is where you can ask it to randomly mute a certain percentage of beats, so that you have to practice cultivating a stronger sense of pulse throughout a passage. I wonder if this might be helpful as well? You can learn more about the rationale and reason for this in these videos:
