I have just done a little experiment.

I suck at guitar, see. Particularly with my sense of timing. Now, this is perhaps not surprising, given that I’ve spent all my time learning bits of solos and shit rather than, y’know, music, and as a result I probably just need to practice playing in time more. I doubt it’s an inherent deficiency.

Nonetheless, I was interested in trying to quantify exactly how poor my timing is, and I thought of a good way to do this using my audio software, Ableton Live. This not only has a good “Warp” feature that lets me slow things down a great deal while still retaining clarity, but also has the ability to minutely adjust the alignment of tracks relative to each other in time.

Here’s what I did.

I hit “record”, set up a metronome with a very clear beep and then played the same note ten times in sync with it. Then, I selected the first note of the recording, set it to loop repeatedly, and slowed it way down to a quarter its original speed so that I could hear it clearly. I was then able to slide the track forwards and backwards a little to get it perfectly in time with the metronome. 

(Amount of correction needed) = (Amount of rhythmic suckage)

I then proceeded to do the same on each of the ten notes. Here’s my data:

Note 1 = -16ms

Note 2 = -28ms

Note 3 = +136ms

Note 4 = +128ms

Note 5 = +118ms

Note 6 = 0ms

Note 7 = +46ms

Note 8 = +46ms

Note 9 = +140ms

Note 10 = +82ms

Notes 1 and 2 were late, the rest were early, except for 6, which was perfect. 7 and 8 were off by the same amount.

I want to take an average of this. Now, it’s important to realise that if you were +50ms on one note and -50ms on another, the two would cancel out and give you the false impression that your timing was perfect. What’s important here is the amount you’re off by, and that means treating all the numbers as positive, rather than treating notes 1 and 2 as negative. So, by my calculations:

Average rhythmic suckage = 74ms

Also, you’ll notice that most of the numbers were early. This means that I was playing ahead of the beat most of the time. My timing is thus misaligned.

Average rhythmic alignment = 65ms early

By my calculations, even if I corrected for the earliness I’d still be off by 56ms on average.

I don’t know how important any of this is, and my methods are a bit loose and subjective and my sample size small. But I’m still curious as to whether it’ll improve with practice.