"To improve timing, play lots with different people and practice, and record your self without a metronome ... je je then with out one and compare.."
But SAMIE, if those people you play with have bad to adequate time, what are you actually practicing? You are practicing to stay together with a group no matter how badly the time fluctuates. Which is NOT the same thing as playing with good time.
"Only listening to your self while you play will help you improve your timing. You HAVE to know if your slow or if you are going fast. Its like pitch, and you need to practice this. "
And how do you practice recognizing pitch and intervals? By practicing them against a constant. You will not hear how inconsistent your tempo sense is UNLESS YOU HEAR IT AGAINST A CONSTANT. Now you don't develop this by simply playing scales or exercise with a metronome, you develop it by developing exercises that have you improvising actual music (or in the case of music that has specifically assigned notes already, practicing a specific piece of music) with a metronome. I've got some great tapes of my teacher playing with a quartet (trumpet, tenor, piano and bass) that plays with a metronome. And it swings UNMERCIFULLY. Cause these guys aren't trying to "nail the time" or "stay on the beat". They're just playing music (improvising over form)with a drummer that happens to only play on 2 and 4 and , oh yeah, is a little machine. And because alla these guys have great time, nobody has to worry about being careful, or making sure of the hook up, or playing it safe, they can play ANYTHING THEY WANT, cause the time is there.
A metronome " is not the best tool for learning the sense of timing." In what way is it not? If you practice by yourself, you have no way of judging what you are doing at the time you are doing it. So, even if you record what you are doing and try to practice it again, in the midst of playing you have NO WAY of knowing if what you are working on is "correct" or if you are again just rehearsing "mistakes". If you play with other musicians with bad time, what you are working on is NOT time. You are merely working on ways to stay together. And if that's what you are doing you are keeping the music at it's lowest common denominator, no one can do anything much different than the approach you've rehearsed because IT WILL THROW EVERYONE ELSE.
As far as your "sing along analogy", you forgot one other approach. Learning to sing specific notes in tune no matter where they occur. Then you don't even have to worry about practicing with a sing along, if you see/hear an A, you sing an A.
Some of this (as I said earlier) may be music specific. As POKEHERTOO points out, his little niece can sing "in time". But what's she singing? MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB or LUSH LIFE? My buddy (and great piano player) Jon's daughter can actually sing little pieces of his compositions back to him. But she can't vary tempo, or key. She can just sing back something that somebody else did. So yeah, everybody out there can tap along to a beat. But they can do that with a metronome as well. And next time yer at a concert and everyone starts clapping along, check out how soon it is that a majority of folks start dragging. And that's with somebody laying down a big bass drum hit when they are supposed to clap. If you play music that has a lot of stuff that people play at the same time (SMOKE ON THE WATER) its gonna be easier to play (even if the time is all f**ked up) cause you have that riff in common to get everything lined up. But if you're playing music that is lightly hung on this rhythmic and harmonic framework, CONSTANT TIME IS A NECESSITY. But PO QUIR, I must disagree: "A metronome is effective because it allows one to hear the beat. It doesn't do anything to help one feel the beat though". Hunh? That's what practicing improvising with a metronome does. It allows you to hear and feel what playing music against a constant time feels like and sounds like.
"Timing isn't just going boom boom in sync with a beat or click that one hears while playing music!" No, to me the time is the constant that everything I am playing falls into. And I can dance all around this constant. It's when the time ISN'T happening that you have to try to find the lowest common denominator that you can line up to.
"unless everyone is playing to the same click, a nome wont be much help when you are playing with other musicians." That may be true if you are playing with other musicians with bad time, but if they have good time it's NOT EVEN A CONCERN. It's like playing with guys that really HEAR music, if you can hear and play what you hear, they hear it too and you are actually PLAYING MUSIC TOGETHER. If all you are doing is playing notes that are "supposed" to work, or licks you took off of somebody's record or bits and pieces of licks that you got from other tunes with similar changes, then there's no music going on, just notes.
My experience has taken me a long way and has put me in situations that have resulted in a LOT of music being made, I think I'll stick with that.
And SAMIE, if you filled out your profile it would be a little easier to give some weight to your opinions. As it stands I can't get past the numerous mis spellings.
