Why Counting Improves Your Rhythm & Timing

For those wanting to go deeper, I made a follow-up answering many questions from this video's comments here: https://youtu.be/4Bhj-qrB6Ao

I really wish you uploaded more :( I never miss a video of yours

As a guitarist mainly, I realize when playing with my band that internal timing is something us 6-strings fanatics never really train.. Thank you so much for sharing this method, I can already isolate a few scenarios where my timing fails!

Man I’m getting that Adam Neely vibe hard but in a diff way that’s fresh! Awesome stuff Shaun!

I wanna see you counting Sequence Start or Drunk! That'd be sick 👌

Don't mumble! As soon as I noticed this in my practice and started "confidently counting" things were better.

I’ve been recording myself without a met lately and listening back to the recording. I’ll put a met on top of the recording and I’ll change the tempo to follow when I rush or drag hearing the inconsistencies. After I watched this I tried counting the quarter note out loud during it, and it was far more consistent then previous times. Thanks for the great tip! I’ll definitely keep this up.

Pure gold!

I've heard this idea before, but this is a much more comprehensive and logical guide. Thanks

Thank you for this incredibly valuable advice. I am going to take it to heart. From now on, counting it is!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU -- i've been playing for thousands of hours but my time is intermediate level at best, and I always felt like I was playing along to the music rather than driving the rhythm, which led to a lot of dragging. It wasn't obvious what specifically I needed to practice. But active time keeping and developing a perfect internal metronome is my new goal now. This video is gold

I love when an 11 year old beginning drum student tells me that they can’t count and play at the same time, it’s just not possible! 😊

Timing is everything, even in pitch, that's a thing I learned on youtube

Okay, I must say that at first I was pretty sceptical about this whole “counting out loud” idea. But now, having spent two months counting over EVERYTHING that I practice, my time-keeping has REALLY REALLY REALLY improved! And yes, adding the voice counting did force me to practice everything at least 20% (and for some exercises even 30%) slower at first. But within the two months I was able to get the speed back to the original level. Not only this whole experiment helped me improve my overall time-keeping, it also helped me keep the subdivision timing (or as Shawn calls it “microtiming”) more consistent.

this is super super important for piano pieces. if you're playing solo piano, it's easy to not have a sense of steady rhythm throughout, and counting really helps this. it becomes even worse when you're practising because while you naturally stay on beat on stage when you mess up, when you're practising you tend to go back and undo the mistake and lose complete track of rhythm. playing with a metronome helps, but I've found counting out loud to help more. P.S. great video as always Shawn, keep it up! P.P.S. more cowbell please

Keep up with those vids man! So refreshing

Thank you Shawn for this incredible lesson!

I'm sure going to try that!! Great advice! Thank you

Amazing how well this simple technique works... just what I needed - thank you for sharing your expertise!

You explain it so well!