the metronome, and yes i hated it too
last lesson was eighth notes and keeping the pulse steady underneath. today we get the tool that actually makes "steady" a real thing you can check, instead of a feeling you're guessing at.
the metronome.
i'll say this up front. i hated it. i wanted to play the music, not click along with a machine that sounds like a dripping faucet. for about the first two weeks i turned it on, sighed, turned it off, and played the piece "how it felt." it did not go well. i was speeding up through the easy parts and slamming the brakes on the hard parts, which felt fine to me and sounded like a car with a bad transmission to anyone listening.
here's the thing behind the thing. a metronome doesn't care how the music feels to you. it just tells the truth about time. and time is the one part of playing that your ear can't fake you out of, not really, not for long. you can fudge a note. you can't fudge a beat that's supposed to land and doesn't.
what it actually is
a metronome gives you a steady click, a certain number of beats per minute. bpm 60 means one click per second, which is a nice slow easy place to start. bpm 120 is twice that. every metronome app or little plastic clicker does the same basic job. you don't need a fancy one. the free app on your phone is fine. i still use the same one i downloaded three years ago.
how to actually practice with it, step by step
start stupidly slow. i mean it. set it to something like 60 bpm even if the piece "should" go faster. your job right now isn't speed, it's landing every note exactly on or between the clicks, no drifting.
play just the right hand alone against the click first. four measures, maybe less if it's a hard section. don't add the left hand until the right hand sits on the beat without you having to think hard about it.
then the left hand alone, same tempo, same small chunk.
then both hands together, still at that slow tempo. this is where it usually falls apart the first few tries, and that's fine, that's the whole point of doing it slow. better to feel it fall apart at 60 than to not notice it's falling apart at 120.
once it holds together clean for a few passes, bump the metronome up by maybe 4 or 5 bpm. not twenty. small steps. work that speed until it's clean, bump again. some days you'll only move up once. some days not at all. that's normal, not failure.
i'd rather be accurate than smooth. a smooth performance where the timing is quietly wrong is worse, to me, than a stiff one where every beat is honest. smooth comes later. accurate has to come first or you're just practicing your mistakes at a nicer volume.
the fingering trap this exposes
this is where i want to bring up something i keep in a spiral notebook. i write fingering numbers in pencil over any measure that's giving me trouble, same way i keep a notebook of yarn weights and hook sizes for crochet, so i'm not relying on memory that's already proven itself unreliable. i showed it to clyde from the ward once and he said it looked like a crime scene diagram, numbers circled, arrows, the works.
here's why that matters for the metronome specifically. when you slow a piece way down, you'll often discover your fingering has been sloppy the whole time and you just never noticed because you were moving fast enough to cover for it. slow tempo has nowhere to hide. if your third finger is scrambling to cover a note it shouldn't be reaching for, you'll feel it immediately at 60 bpm in a way you never felt it at full speed. write the correct fingering in pencil right then, over that measure, before you speed back up. otherwise your fingers will just re-memorize the scramble.
a caution, not a big one
don't grit your teeth and push through tension in your hand or wrist to "keep up" with the click. if you feel yourself tensing up to hit a beat, that's the metronome telling you the tempo is still too fast for where you are, not a sign to push harder. drop the speed. nobody's grading you on bpm.
before next time
pick one line from a piece you're already working on, set the metronome to something embarrassingly slow, and run it hands separate, then together, for five honest minutes a day. write down any fingering that falls apart. we'll check it next lesson.