In Praise of the Metronome

From time to time, I see students advised to ditch the metronome. I find such advice odd, especially when directed at students. (Students are notorious for struggling to keep a beat.) What’s particularly irksome is that there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the true value of a metronome.

The misunderstanding is this: the metronome’s only value is that it teaches us how to keep a steady tempo. Well, it may do so, but that’s not its greatest value. Its greatest value is that it makes us objective. Rather than relying on our internal and subjective sense of tempo, the metronome makes us attend to something outside ourselves. We must match our playing to something that cares not a whit for our problems in playing a nettlesome passage. Either we can do it or we can’t. The metronome definitively tells us. There’s no negotiating, begging, or wheedling with it.

That’s something that transfers seamlessly to playing well with other musicians. So if playing with a metronome annoys you, then think differently. Think of it as the real friend who tells you the truth, rather than the false friend who praises anything you do.

Some argue that using a metronome suppresses the tempo-keeping part of ones’s brain. In fact, it does the opposite. When playing with a metronome, your mind must be active, continuously predicting where the next beat will be. You can’t passively play along with a metronome. If you’re waiting for the next beat, then you’ll always be late. You come in square on the beat only because you correctly predicted its arrival. In fact, there may be times when, playing with a metronome, you can’t hear the ticking because your own playing masks it—you’re that spot on. It’s weird and fun when this happens. It’s also a sign of an engaged mind.

There’s another reason to use a metronome that gets overlooked. Students often freak out over playing in front of an audience. Why? There are many reasons. But a crucial one is that, when playing in front of an audience, our reaction to every little mistake magnifies. Mistakes in performance seem much worse than mistakes in the solitude of practice. So our stress level skyrockets.

An obvious solution is to bring this heightened stress into the practice room. Once you realize this, you start looking for surefire ways to dial up stress in the practice room. For example, zero tolerance for mistakes. (Concert guitarist John Williams, asked how he deals with mistakes during practice, replied: “I don’t make them.”) Practice with your eyes closed. Record yourself. Sit in an unfamiliar chair. In short, embrace anything that rattles you, and then learn how to handle it.

For some, the metronome is the perfect stressor. If the metronome freaks you out, then that’s precisely why you should use it. After all, where would you rather work on handling stress: in the practice room, or in front of an audience?