This may sound stupid but...

[BrandonBass]

how do I practise with a metronome? I usually practise with guitarpro's drumtracks of a certain song im learning and try to stay in time...

but when i play the metronome it just stay at a constant beat with no change in rhythm....so should i only stick to constant notes and play to the beats or what?

anyhow is it a bad habit to not play with a metronome? i haven been practising with 1 and my drummer's pretty fine w my timing anyways

[VanillaO]

I'm not sure if this is what your'e asking, but a metronome will only go tock tock tock at a certain # of beats per minute. You can speed this up and slow this down, but the rhtyhm of the tocks should be straight beats. For what you want, I'd suggest sticking with GP

[wtg203]

Playing with the 'click' on One Two Three and Four is a good place to start, but then try moving the 'clicks' around, say, on just Two and Four (set the metronome to half the speed it was at). Then try playing with it just on One, or just on Three, or any combinations you can think of. Theres a Victor Wooten instructional video somewhere where the click only plays like once every four measures of whatever he's playing, and he nails the click every time it comes around. Thats rhythm.

[JimmyM]

No, it's not a bad habit at all not playing to a metronome. However, you can get a lot of usage out of one.

Practice your favorite exercises at a slower speed on your metronome at first until you get it perfect. Then gradually increase the speed a little and practice it until you get it to the new speed, and keep trying to increase speed, but never move on until you can play it perfectly.

Set it to a very low speed like 50 or 60 and practice playing very slowly. Do quarter notes, half notes, whole notes, and try to make it sound musical. I think this exercise is even better than building speed. Anyone can play fast, but not a lot of people can lay down whole notes without being off.

Anyway, there's a couple ideas.

[Setebos]

I find it very useful. Especially to practice songs I'm learning or groove's at a low tempo (45 to 60.) Once I learn them at those tempos is easier to speed them up and get them done properly.
One thing that I do often is to play a groove at any certain tempo between the ones mentioned above and at some point I turn off the quarter notes, letting only the 1 first beat sounding (seems exactly the excercise mentioned by Wtg23) and try to keep everything in time.

It can get very frustrating sometimes but I'm sure is worth in the long run.

[BassChuck]

A lot of good threads in this forum on this topic.