The Metronome.

The metronome is an ancient tool which counts beats as you practice. It goes TICK..... TICK...... TICK.... or BEEEP ....BEEEEP .... BEEEEEP... depending on what kind you have. You can set it for various speeds, rhythms and tempos. When I first began practicing on my cheaper ($150) Yamaha keyboard, it had a built-in metronome and I used it sometimes to help my counting when I was learning the difference between whole, half, and quarter notes. By the time I got to eighth and sixteenth notes, I'd dropped the metronome because I more or less began counting by tapping my foot or counting in my head. My upscale Casio didn't have a metronome built-in because it was a piano and nothing more--no bells and whistles.

My teacher at the time asked if I had a metronome, so I bought one, not one of the cool wooden ones, but a small electronic ones. I used it a couple of times but found it so distracting at first I only used it a few times. After I became more confident, I used it to measure my tempo.

My current teacher keeps telling me to slow down when I'm practicing and learning a new piece. I thought I had, but I discovered what considered "slow" isn't the same thing as what she meant--not by a factor of about three. But the very useful metronome straightened me out.

She set the tempo at 84 beats per minute. This may sound fast, but not when you're playing a piece with six beats per measure, like Cristofori's Dream. In fact, it's almost maddeningly restrained. My problem is that I hear the piece of music in my head and try to play along. then my mind can't understand why my fingers keep producing this cacophonous horror. The metronome makes me play the notes slowly enough for my mind to think about where to place my fingers next. Soon, all my mistakes dissipated. Furthermore, my learning curve went from cosine to sine (for those of you familiar with Cartesian dynamics, this is a good thing).



I think the steady BEEEP..... BEEEEEP.... has a hypnotic effect. It focuses my concentration more intensely on the passage I'm practicing. It also overloads the brain with input and stops extraneous thought. If I knew this a few months ago I would have used my metronome for something other than to hold the pages of my music books open. I'm a believer in this technique now. I think I may have to upgrade my little electronic beeper to something bigger and more professional soon.