arguably the most important part of playing is rhythm. yes, the actual pitches you play matter, but when is probably more important. you can certainly play all the wrong notes but if they're right on time then i guess it's just "jazzy".
for years my rhythm was trash. i understood "the beat" and i safely stuck to 8th notes. those pesky 16ths would sorta get slurred, or [un]intentionally forgotten, and as long as i came in about on the 1 then i felt it was good. rhythm and timing were a few of those things that i sorta got but totally not really so i avoided them altogether. i'd run into problems later on when i started to knuckle down and realized it was just another aspect i knew nothing about. it was added to the list of things to work on, and i did.
here's an exercise in futility, go to your search engine of choice and google "rhythm" and "guitar"... good luck yielding anything helpful. believe me i searched high and low looking for information on how to work on my rhythm, but as you can see those search terms are problematic. whatever variation of terms i chose brought me to the same dead ends and yet again i was frustrated by the nebulousness of guitar education.
then it occurred to me, as with everything else i was working on i'd break it down to the simplest pieces as possible. if i wanted to improve my rhythm and sense of time i was obviously looking in the wrong place, guitarists are pretty notorious for having wishy-washy time, anyhow. if i wanted to improve my rhythm then i'd focus on only rhythm... percussion. bingo.
the book is straight up percussion... very fundamental stuff with lots of RLRL. i just translated that to down/up and it works quite well for guitar. i spent months with a metronome and this book... pretty much the entire spring and summer of 2018. each day i'd sit down, set the metronome to something slow and i'd go page by page, sight reading the rhythm, and counting 1, 2, 3, 4 out loud as i played. after a while i started experimenting with different tempos, nothing too crazy, but reasonable for anything i'd want to play.
after 5 months or so of daily work on my rhythm and timing i felt pretty solid, and indeed i had improved quite a bit since i had gotten the book. i go back to it every few months to keep things in shape and recently i've been using it a lot. it feels good like going to the gym. gyms are terrible, but you get the idea.
i'll tell you what else feels good... i had sat down to record some stuff recently. mostly just sketching out some ideas that will go nowhere. i sat down to do the bass part and i laid out a track. when i was done i looked at the waveform and it was ON. i mean, it was so on the grid i was like dayum! now, i know being too on time can have its taste issues too, but but i think it's good to be able to play right on the money and not have to fix it in post. i think the challenging part will be laying back now that i've spent so much time practicing being on.
