Bass Practice With a Metronome: Groove First, Speed Second

Bass practice with a metronome has a different job than guitar practice. Guitarists mostly use the click to get faster; bass players use it to get deeper — because nobody hires a bassist for 190 BPM, they hire the one who doesn't move at 92. The routine below builds both, in that order.

Groove work: make the click disappear

• Put the click on beats 2 and 4 (half the BPM, felt as a backbeat) — it exposes drift that a four-on-the-floor click masks.
• Then thin it further: click once per bar. Your internal clock carries the rest.
• Play a one-bar line until the click stops being audible as a separate thing — that's the lock.

Speed work: bass has ceilings too

Fast fingerstyle lines, string-skipping octaves, walking at up-tempo swing — these are speed skills, and they respond to exactly the same loop as any other instrument: short fragment, clean and relaxed at the current tempo for 4–10 reps, then 5 BPM up. Plucking-hand tension is the usual bass-specific ceiling; if your forearm pumps up in thirty seconds, the tempo is too high to be building anything.

Stamina is its own fragment

A bassist's reality is eight choruses, not eight bars. Log a sustained fragment — the same line held for two or three minutes — separately from the burst version. The sustained clean tempo is the one that matters on a gig, and watching it close the gap to your burst tempo is real, trackable progress.

What to log

Treat each real line as a fragment: the verse groove, the fill into the chorus, the walking pattern. Log the clean tempo where the pocket still feels good — not the fastest scramble. Over weeks you get a map of your instrument: which lines are solid at gig tempo and which one is quietly capping the set list.

Crank. isn't guitar-only — fragments, targets, and clean-max charts work the same for bass lines and fingerstyle drills. Free on the App Store for iPhone.