How to practise with a metronome

A ruler, not a judge

Plenty of players treat the metronome as something that catches them out. The click sounds, they scramble to land on it, they blame themselves when they miss, and eventually turning it on becomes something they avoid. That version of the exercise is hard to sustain and does not teach much.

Change the framing and the tool changes with it. The metronome measures which way your playing leans and by how much. Ahead of the click means you are rushing; behind it means your hands were not ready. Knowing which of the two it is already tells you what to fix.

So the first move is to stop aiming at the click and start hunting for disagreements with it. The places where they happen are predictable: bars with a large positional jump, the downbeat of a chord change, and the moment a fast run resolves into a long note.

Pick a starting tempo you can hear yourself at

Starting at the target tempo is the most common error. At the target tempo your hands are already hurried and you cannot hear your own playing. Repetition without hearing yourself just sets the mistake.

Find the tempo at which you can play three clean passes in a row and begin there, even if it is half your goal. Slow playing is where you notice tension in the wrist, the hand arriving late, the note dying early. Nearly every mistake at speed was already visible, in small form, slowly.

There is such a thing as too slow, though. Below roughly 40 BPM the gaps become so wide that your sense of pulse deteriorates rather than improves. When that happens, double the tempo and turn on a subdivision instead — the density stays the same and the pulse survives.

Three clean passes, then fewer clicks

Three clean passes earns 5 BPM. A failure costs 5 BPM and the three passes have to be earned again. The rule stays simple because anything you have to deliberate over mid-practice breaks concentration. Twenty to twenty-five BPM in a session is an excellent day.

Raising the number is not the only kind of progress. Removing clicks at the same tempo counts just as much. Go from clicking every beat, to only beats 2 and 4, to only the downbeat of the bar. Each removal hands more of the timekeeping back to you, which is the entire point of the exercise.

Play eight bars with only the downbeat clicking. If beat 1 still agrees at the end, you have built the clock. If it slipped, find the bar where it slipped and work on that bar by itself — always faster than another lap through the whole piece.

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