Short YouTube clip (Lauren Bateman) giving beginner guitar advice: don’t start with a metronome; instead time chord changes for 60 seconds to get a baseline (beats per minute) and track weekly increases as a progress scorecard. Emphasizes that initial speeds (teens–20s BPM) are normal and improvement is the goal.
Most of my students start if you're just at the white belt level, level one. I usually tell people, don't use a metronome. Time yourself for 60 seconds so that you can get a baseline. Because most of my students, when they start playing, it's not uncommon for chord changes to be in the teens or even in the 20s, which is very slow. Okay. And there's nothing wrong with that. We all start there. So just because I'm saying it's slow, it gets better. But you just write it down. So you're like, week one, 20 beats per minute. Great. Now you practice, and then next week you Write down week two, 30 beats per minute, and you're like, wow, it got faster. Now 30 is still pretty slow. You're not going to play songs at 30 beats per minute. But what it does is that it's the scorecard. You see the number going up, and it is a visual representation that you are making progress.
