How to Use a Metronome - Advantages and Disadvantages

Intro - Table - Get Bounce Metronome Pro

Intro

The metronome is undoubtedly an extremely useful tool for musicians. Yet it's also a much criticised tool with many composers and musicians speaking strongly against its use. It's just a tool, and like any tool can be used well or badly. You'll make better use of a metronome if you know the advantages and pitfalls of metronome use.

For many quotes try a google search for Advantages of metronome use. See the wikipedia article: Criticism of metronome use. See Max's Metronome Course

If you use Bounce Metronome Pro well and wisely, you can benefit from the many advantages of metronome practice, and avoid the pitfalls.

Learn to play a steady tempo, to keep better in time with other musicians, and stay on the beat, or play ahead or behind the beat as desired.
Improve sensitivity to beat variations within the bar, respond to tempo changes quickly, and change tempo gradually over a number of bars in a smooth professional way,
Swing the beat cleanly, improve coordination with other players and play difficult passages cleanly and confidently

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Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages	Disadvantages	Way to counteract in Bounce Metronome Pro
Play a steady tempo	Tempo can be too rigid and metronomic, with no variation, with exactly the same timing for each bar.	Practice with gradual tempo changes, and with the lilt bars feature
Keep in time	Beats can be too metronomic	Practice with swing, lilt, or tap out rhythm. Try to play these rhythms with your notes merging with the ticks just as you do with the steady beat.
Stay on the beat	Sometimes it's good to play ahead or behind the beat.	Once you have learnt to play to merge your note with the metronome click , try again and this time play always ahead of the metronome beat. Try again, this time always behind it. As an exercise, see how close you can get to the beat and still stay always ahead - or always behind - respectively. Try the Rhythm Tap Timing window (Ctrl + 237) to add the tap timing strip to the bouncing balls window, and use it with this exercise. As before, see how close you can get your taps to the beat and stay always ahead of it (or always behind it).
Increase Sensitivity to Tempo	Become a slave to tempo markings so that you don't play at the speed that feels natural to you	Try the piece at many different tempi. Use the tap with BACKSPACE key to set tempo feature to set the tempo that feels natural to you without looking at the dial first
Improve Coordination with other Players.	Lose rhythmic independence, ability to bend the rhythm and lead with the rhythm. Lose ability to keep a steady tempo without the metronome to help you.	Practice sometimes with the sound switched off as a silent metronome. Let yourself bend the rhythm from bar to bar. Use the metronome with restraint, continue to do plenty of practice without the metronome. Practice with the metronome set to tick on every other beat, e.g. 2nd and 4th. Only the 2nd beat of each bar. Only every other bar, and so on. Practice polyrhythms - either one rhythm in each hand on keyboard instrument - or play in one rhythm with the metronome set to play another rhythm - or both rhythms. You can do this with any music not just polyrhythmic music, as an exercise. So for instance with a piece in 4/4 set the metronome to 4/4 and 3/4 played simultaneously, or 4/4 and 5/4, then play your piece in time with the 4/4 rhythm on the metronome. Now mute one of the rhythms on the metronome so it only plays 3/4 (or 5/4) and see if you can continue to play a steady 4/4 with four beats to the same bar. Polyrhythms are great for helping to develop rhythmic independence.
Exposes any tendency to slow down at difficult passages. With the metronome, you have to play them at tempo	May easily miss notes and play badly when you play the difficult passage at speed - and repeating just reinforces that bad way of playing	Take care when practicing difficult passages that you don't reinforce your mistakes. Spend some time focussing on the difficult passage and get it right at speed before you play through the whole piece. It can help to play it many times faster than needed, then once slower. Or to play it slowly and gradually speed it up. You can use either or both approaches. See below.

Short Difficult Passages

Dealing with short difficult passages in a longer piece is particularly tricky, and the metronome can be part of your practice session for these. It is worth thinking about how best to do this as you may well spend a lot of your metronome practice sessions on this sort of thing.

A common way for beginners to practice is to just keep playing the piece all the way through and always stumble at the same place - either with or without a metronome. Every time you do that, it reinforces that mistake.

So - generally this is not a good way to practice it - even with a metronome, this approach may well just reinforce all your mistakes.

To deal with this focus on just the difficult passage in isolation - often only a few notes, and practice it until you can get it right. It is good to include a few notes before and after it - maybe a bar or half a bar or two bars inluding the pattern, so you can easily repeat it over and over - this also makes it easier to include the passage in the rest of the piece when you play it all the way through (otherwise you may well stumble and forget your place e.g. immediately after the difficult passage)..

So - you practice the difficult passage quite a few times, maybe a dozen times or whatever just in isolation with a few notes of context to either side. Then finally play it again in context with the rest of the piece so you don't lose its connection with the whole piece.

There are two main ways to do this.

Slower, speeding up

One way is to play the difficult passage slowly and gradually speed up say by one notch at a time, or using the gradualy changing tempo feature on the metronome. This is quite useful - if you start a fair way below the desired tempo and speed up gradually you can end up faster than you thought you could play.

But it has disadvantages as well since you may well use slightly different muscle coordination often at higher speeds. So all the slow repeats require you to use your muscles in one way and reinforce that way of playing - then as it gets faster it may get harder to play just because it starts to feel unfamiliar under your fingers after all those slow repetitions.

If this happens to you, then to help with this it may help to play the same difficult passage at many speeds and in many ways so your fingers don't get locked into one particular style of playing for the passage.

Also, another approach is the opposite of the speeding up method. Instead play it at speed faster than it needs to be to start with.

Faster, last time slow

If you make the passage short enough, even just a few notes, then you may be able to learn to play it at speed quite quickly - as it is often the length of the passage and the sustained nature of the difficulties that are the problem rather than any individual notes or transitions as such.

So - start with a short phrase which you feel you can learn to play at speed - as usual with a few notes before and after to connect it to the rest of the piece. Practice it and memorise it always with the metronome set to a bit faster than the intended speed (this makes the intended speed feel easier because it is a bit slower than the speed you practiced it at).

If you can't play it at speed, skip notes if necessary to start with e.g. play every other note - so that you still feel what it is like under your fingers (or whatever it is) at tempo or faster than the desired tempo. Then once you are comfortable with this, fill in the skipped notes and try again. That stage is a bit like adding ornaments to a piece.

However if you use this approach, it is also important to be able to play the passage slowly as well - playing at speed can hide a lot.

So, each time, after you play the same short passage a number of times quickly, it can help to play it one final time with the metronome set to a slower tempo - somehow also, this helps to fix it in your memory.

So - you can go through all the difficult passages like this. Then to make sure you keep the context of the whole piece, you play the whole piece through as a complete piece - and when you come to the difficult passages don't worry if you stumble over them, keep going and make your aim this time to play all the bars at tempo without losing your place in the rhythm.

See the free on-line Piano Fundamentals book for some interesting sidelights on this, which are relevant for players of all instruments.

It can help to listen to it in your mind's ear first

It can also help to listen to it in your mind's eye (well ear) first each time you play it, the ideal glitch free performance, what you want it to sound like. I.e. play it in your mind's ear first, then play it for real, and repeat like that alternating between the two.

If you don't think you can play it in your mind's ear, try, you may surprise yourself. Play it for real if necessary first and immediately after you play the phrase, see if you can remember the sound of what you just played. If you can, try to play it back in your mind, like an echo, like remembering a word with all its inflections, accents, tone of voice etc immediately after you heard it. If you can then that means you are able to play it in your mind's ear.

This playback in your minds eye then is surprisingly flexible, and you can learn to play around with it. For instance - what would it sound like on another instrument? At another pitch maybe below what you can play or above, maybe even way below (foghorn or thunder) or way above (bat squeak)? At different speeds way beyond what you would play in real life? Can you imagine what it sounds like that way, or if not imagine exactly, just touch on it in your mind, an impression of what it might sound like to hear it played like that?

So using this flexibility, play the phrase back in your mind as you would like it to be rather than as you actually played it (possibly with stumbles and so on). Then play it as you imagined it, as best you can. Do all this with or without the metronome. Repeat until you can play it just as you'd like to hear it.

These are just hints to get you started

This is just a hint of a direction - in case you haven't come across some of these different ways of practicing. It's not meant as a practice plan or anything like that, I'm not the one to advise on that. Just as hints or pointers to something else.

It may help you to get started again if you feel at a loss and not sure what to do next - and to realise maybe that there are more ways of dealing with them than you realised. Then perhaps you can ask around or explore your own practice ideas, and find out more about the different ways of dealing with difficult passages.

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Get Bounce Metronome Pro

Download your Free Test Drive of Bounce Metronome Pro Now!

It's extremely user friendly. Click the preset button for the rhythm you want to play, and adjust the tempo with the handy dial. To find the Changing Tempo and Lilt bars feature, choose Bounce Metronome Pro from the drop list of metronomes. To practice Lilt and Swing try the Swing metronome.

You get a free 30 day Test drive - with all the features fully unlocked. To get the program go here :

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