You can have all the technique in the world, but if your internal sense of time isn’t solid, playing with other musicians will always feel uncertain. Tom Quayle’s approach to rhythm and time feel goes deeper than just practising with a metronome — it’s about building a genuinely reliable internal clock that stays steady even when the external pulse disappears.
What you’ll get out of this lesson
A structured framework for developing your internal metronome using the Victor Wooten bar-removal exercise, an understanding of the difference between externalised and internalised time, and practical tools for expanding your rhythmic vocabulary across multiple subdivisions.
Externalised vs Internalised Time
Tom draws a clear distinction between two ways of perceiving time. Externalised time is when a drum loop, a metronome, or another musician is giving you the pulse — you’re responding to an outside signal. Most of us practise this way, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But the problem arises in performance: real musicians don’t lock in the way a metronome does. They have a slight ebb and flow, an almost organic variation in the pulse. If your time depends entirely on that external signal, you’ll struggle to hold steady when the signal wavers or disappears.
Internalised time is your ability to perceive and maintain the pulse from the inside, without any external reference. That’s what this session is designed to build.
The Victor Wooten Bar-Removal Exercise
The foundation of the session is what Tom calls the Victor Wooten exercise — a simple but deeply effective approach to developing your internal clock. Set up a four-bar drum loop in a DAW (Tom uses Studio One, but Logic, GarageBand, Cubase, or even Reaper’s free version all work). Then start removing bars from the loop:
- First, mute bar four — so you hear bars one, two, and three, then silence where bar four was. Your job is to feel bar four passing and clap on beat one of the next cycle.
- Then mute bars three and four — you hear bars one and two, then silence.
- Eventually, you work down to just bar one playing, with three bars of silence.
Tom’s important instruction: when you do this exercise, put the guitar down. Technical issues with the instrument can mask time feel problems, and at this stage you want to isolate your rhythmic perception as purely as possible. Use a clap or a tap on your knee instead.
It’s the space that causes people issues. It’s not listening to the drum groove, it’s that space — and it’s the same thing with playing.
Why a DAW Beats a Plain Metronome
Tom recommends doing this work in a DAW rather than with a metronome alone, because a DAW gives you far more flexibility: you can set precise bar structures, mute specific bars, and work with groove-based drum loops that feel more musical than a click. A metronome can work, but it requires some creative tricks to replicate the same exercises. If you don’t have a paid DAW, GarageBand (free on Mac) or the free version of Studio One are both capable of everything this session requires.
Expanding Your Rhythmic Vocabulary
Once the bar-removal exercise is solid, the same framework applies to developing fluency across subdivisions. Tom’s focus in this session is not on genre-specific time feels (like swing) but on your ability to improvise with any subdivision — eighth notes, triplets, sixteenth notes — and to switch between them cleanly. The goal is that you can play those subdivisions musically and freely, not just mechanically when given a predetermined line to read.
The bar-removal exercise gives you the internal clock; the next stage is to practise landing lines with different subdivisions cleanly over the muted bars — proving to yourself that your internal pulse stays intact regardless of what your hands are doing.
Taking it further
Once you’re comfortable with the bar-removal exercise in a four-bar structure, try increasing the amount of silence. Work up to removing three bars, leaving only one bar of drum groove — and eventually try it with just two beats playing and the rest silent. The longer the silence, the more clearly you’ll hear whether your internal clock is truly solid or whether it drifts. Recording yourself while doing this (even just on a phone) makes the drifting much easier to detect and correct.
Your homework
Set up a four-bar drum loop in any DAW at a comfortable tempo (around 80–100 BPM is a good starting point). Spend five minutes each day on the bar-removal exercise: start by muting bar four for several cycles until your clap is consistently landing on beat one, then move to muting bars three and four. Do this with your guitar put aside — just clap or tap. After a week, start bringing the guitar back in and try playing simple lines during the active bars, keeping time through the silent ones.