Practising With a Metronome

Playing along is not practising

Most people switch a metronome on, play through a passage, and switch it off again. That tells you almost nothing. The click is not there to accompany you — it is there to expose exactly where and how you drift.

The useful question is never "did I stay with it?" but "where did I pull away, and what was happening in the music when I did?" Rushing almost always has a cause: a hard passage you are anxious about, a leap you are bracing for, a breath you are not taking.

Finding your real starting tempo

Pick the tempo at which you can play the passage perfectly, not the one at which you can nearly play it. Most people start thirty percent too fast and spend the session rehearsing their mistakes.

A reliable test: play the passage four times in a row. If all four are clean, the tempo is right. If three are clean, drop five BPM. Practising at a tempo where you fail a quarter of the time is practising failure.

Moving up in increments

Once four repetitions are clean, raise the tempo by about five BPM and repeat. At 100 BPM a five-BPM step is a five percent change, which is small enough that your playing adapts without noticing.

Going backwards when a step fails is the part people skip, and it is the part that works. A failed repetition at 90 means 90 is not yet yours.

Subdivisions: when to add them and when to drop them

Setting the metronome to eighth or sixteenth notes fills in the gaps between beats. This helps when a passage keeps rushing, because the subdivision makes the exact moment of the push audible.

It also becomes a crutch. If you can only stay in time with sixteenths clicking, the time is the metronome's, not yours. Use subdivisions to diagnose a problem, then remove them.

The drop-beat exercise

This is the exercise that separates playing along from keeping time, and it runs in the opposite direction to subdivisions.

1. Set the metronome to half your tempo, so it clicks on beats one and three only.
2. Once that is comfortable, halve it again — one click per bar, on the downbeat.
3. Then one click every two bars.

At 120 BPM a click on every downbeat is one every 2000 ms — two full seconds of silence to keep time through. When the click returns and you are still exactly with it, the time is genuinely internal.

Almost everyone finds this uncomfortable at first, and almost everyone improves quickly once they stick with it.

A practical session structure

• Warm up without a click. Find the music first.
• Diagnose with subdivisions. Locate where you drift.
• Step up in fives. Four clean repetitions per step.
• Finish with dropped beats. Prove the time is yours.
• Play it once with no click at all. That is the real test.