Practicing with a metronome is the long-established method for learning to keep solid time. Playing scales and chord progressions with the metronome forces you to recognize any tendency you might have to speed up or slow down while you’re playing and helps you correct it. Metronome practice also allows you to gradually and effectively improve the speed of all your techniques.
Today there are many better options than the monotonous click-click-click of the traditional metronome. One is to replace it with a drum machine, which is a hundred times more fun to practice with than a metronome. In my guitar studio, I have a Boss Dr. Rhythm DR-3 Standard that I’m very happy with. It comes loaded with 100 presets that provide studio-quality drum sounds and accompanying bass guitar tracks. And, if that’s not enough, you can program 100 more of your own. At $219 it’s a great deal. You can check it out here at GuitarCenter.com
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However, you don’t have to spend money to get access to a drum machine right now because there are some good ones available at no cost on the Internet. One of them is the Monkey Machine, an online drum machine that allows you to build your own rhythm patterns on a full set of sampled drums. Monkey Machine is easy to use: in 4/4 time the beats are divided into 16th notes and you can place any part of the full drum kit on any beat to create the rhythms and accents of your choice. You can also change the time signature by editing the pattern length, such as making it 12 beats long if you want to play in 3/4 time or 20 beats long if you want to play in 5/4. And, when you build a rhythm that you’re happy with you have the option to download it as a MIDI file.