Practising play/pause on time in a bar

What this lesson teaches

The shortest exercise in the course, and the sort of thing that looks too simple to bother with.

The drill

Press play at the start of a bar. Count four beats. Press cue.

The track jumps back and waits. Press play again, count eight beats - two bars - and press cue.

That is all of it. One two three four. One two three four five six seven eight.

What it is actually training

Two things, both of which you will use every time you play.

Starting on the one. Every drop you ever make has to land on the first beat of a bar, and your finger has to move slightly before the beat arrives for the sound to come out on it. That is a physical timing skill, and it is learned by doing it a few hundred times rather than by understanding it.

Counting while doing something else. In the mix you will be counting bars and watching a fader and listening to a cue. Counting is the thing that collapses first when your attention is divided. Practising it against a mechanical action builds it into something that keeps running underneath.

Why four and then eight

Because those are the units the music is built from. Four beats is a bar; eight is two bars; and the magic numbers from the counting lessons are all multiples of them.

Getting your hand used to landing at those intervals means that when a lesson says "come in after eight bars", your body already knows roughly how long that is.

It is two minutes of practice and it is worth doing before every session.