Playing with the Metronome

You can love it, trust me.

Mind Games with the Metronome

I started musing on metronome practice recently after playing a gig with the wonderful Anna Bosnick and Colin Forhan. Colin mentioned that, practicing with a metronome, instead of playing with the click falling on beats 1 and 3, he would shift to playing with the click on 2 and 4. Then he cut the metronome speed by half, so the click fell just on 1, then 2, then 3, then 4. Then (most challenging), he tried playing with the click hitting on the “ands” (i.e. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +).

That sounded like fun.

Which made me think: We don’t usually associate metronome practice with fun. It’s safe to say many musicians think of metronome practice as a grueling and disheartening process in which you force yourself to play in strictly metered box. Or you may use the metronome to slowly grind your way to higher and higher tempos. Once, when my accordion teacher Paul Young asked me to play a tune for him at 50 beats per minute (BPM) I joked that he was “metronome shaming” me. It’s easy to let the metronome become a source of shame, or think of it as a way to measure our ability in some quantitative way.

The metronome is a tool, and it can be used in a lot of fun ways.

Today I set out to explore some of these ways. I hope that reading through this gives you some ideas of your own.

Metronome Play

Pick something you can play reasonably well, and set the metronome about 10 BPM slower than what you think is a comfortable speed. The goal is to make it easy enough that you don’t have to worry too much about wrong notes, without the music becoming dreadfully dirgelike.

• As you play, go for the most perfect tone, the best interpretation. Be inquisitive. Listen deeply for subtleties in your playing: How do you start and end notes? Is your tone even? Can you hear things like breaths, bellows changes, string changes? Do you have the control to change what you want to change? See if you can find phrases, and emphasize them in your playing without slowing down or speeding up.
• Watch what goes on in your thoughts as you play. Are you able to focus on listening to yourself? Do you feel like you’re secure in each note or are there places where you’re scrabbling for the next note or chord? After you’ve had your little moment to find that challenging note or chord, how quickly can you get back into a listening state? Does it help to become aware of your body, your posture, your level of relaxation?
• Play with dynamics. Play one phrase loud, and the next phrase quietly. Depending on the melody, try cutting that period in half, so you play a shorter section, even just a couple of notes, loud then soft. Try reversing the dynamics to soft/loud. Play through an entire section (say, an A part, 8 bars, or 16 bars), getting gradually louder and louder. Do the opposite. Try getting louder and louder and then suddenly quiet. Some of us naturally slow down or speed up as we change dynamics. The metronome will keep you “honest” and help you get better at incorporating (and hearing) musical interpretation without changing tempo.
• You can work in lots of other ideas depending on what you’re working on: bowing, breathing or bellowing patterns, chording, heavily ornamented/not ornamented, short phrases/long phrases, staccato/legato, or whatever you can think of. If there are two similar phrases (this is common), how differently can you play each one?
• Try a simple “improv” practice. Play the tune for a phrase, and then play something else for an equal amount of time, then catch back up to the tune again. The metronome will help you here, because it will be the same number of clicks for each section: Tune/Something else/Tune/Something else. If you’re new to this idea, you can just play one note for “something else.” If that’s really a struggle, just play nothing! The hard part will be putting your fingers back on the right notes after the space. The most important thing is to keep the metronome going, and to keep your ideas simple enough that you can do them and get back to the tune. Forgive yourself for making mistakes. Don’t worry that you didn’t create amazing improv. What you will develop from this practice is a deeper knowledge of the tune and more comfort in playing it without metaphorically holding on like a cicada to the melody at all times. If you feel ready to make your improv more complex, that’s fine, as long as you stay focused on the idea that this is about moving forward and getting back to the tune on time.

Speeding Up

You can use the metronome to practice speeding up without it becoming a measuring stick for beating yourself up. Here are a couple of ways:

• Speed up by just a little. 4BPM or 10BPM at most. What happens? If, at a slower speed, you paid attention to what your body felt like, what was happening in your mind, or your ability to control phrasing and dynamics, you’ll have an easier time perceiving differences when the speed increases. What else happens? If everything’s perfectly easy, try inching up the metronome again. Are you still able to keep intonation, or bellowing or breathing patterns that you had before? Do certain bowings become more difficult or just nonsensical? Do some ornaments become easier? This can be really interesting and give you new ideas for things to work on.
• Sit on this slightly faster speed and work on just one of those changes that you noticed. Try to get back the feeling that you had at the slower speed, just for that one thing. Don’t make it a contest, just listen to yourself, relax, and try. This may not get 100% fixed today, but you’re drawing your attention to it in a new way, and that by itself is very powerful.
• Set the metronome to just faster than you can comfortably play. Now, instead of grappling to play every note perfectly, see if you can recapture the comfortable, confident feeling you had when you played at a comfortable speed. Since no one is listening, it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes. Stick with the tempo, and let go of the idea of playing the challenging parts of the tune perfectly. Lean in to the parts that you can play well. Explore that feeling of playing at least part of the tune well, a little faster than you’re comfortable playing. See if you can just extend that comfortable feeling farther out into other parts of the tune.
• Now go back to the slower speed. What happens?
• Etc.

Summing Up

The operative concept is play. Don’t worry at all about whether you’re good at this. It doesn’t matter. Try to drop the entire idea of measurement or goal for this practice. The goal is to become better at playing, so be playful!

If you aren’t really “into” practicing with a metronome, this might be a good way to enter. My yoga teacher always said that the poses you don’t like are the ones you need to do the most. I’m not sure I always agree, but many musicians who avoid metronomes really would benefit by practicing with one.

There’s nothing intrinsic to a metronome that forces you to become a more mechanical or boring player. It’s just a tool, and you can use it to develop flexibility, control, musicality, and self-knowledge.

Bonus: After doing this for 10 minutes you’re really going to know that tune.

Note: Some people find that the sound of the metronome click itself causes them to tense. They find that drum sounds (available on some apps) are more helpful. Most metronome apps have alternate sounds. Whatever works for you is fine. It’s likely that once you get used to playing with a metronome, the actual sound of the click will assume less importance to you.