A metronome for piano practice

Finding where the hands disagree

If a passage sounds muddy hands together but clean hands separately, one hand is arriving fractionally late. The way to find out which is to play each hand alone against the click. If the left hand is accurate alone but drags when combined, the problem is attention, not fingers.

From there, switch on a subdivision and slow right down. With eighths clicking, you can hear exactly which grid position the right hand's sixteenths share with the left hand's eighths, and the two lock together far faster than they would through repetition alone.

Managing speed through technical work

Exercises like Hanon and scales are the easiest material in the world to practise badly, because raising the number is more fun than listening. Push the tempo before the fingers are even and the weakness of the fourth and fifth fingers gets set in place.

A better approach is to start at about sixty percent of your target and raise by five, checking at every step that all notes are equal in volume. A pass with uneven tone is not a pass. The tempo where evenness collapses is today's ceiling; tomorrow you start below it.

Feeling 3/4 against 6/8

A waltz in 3/4 and a 6/8 bar of six eighth notes can look similar on the page and feel completely different. Three equal beats is not the same as two big beats of three. Set each signature here and listen to the accents, and the difference is immediate.

In 6/8, accent beats 1 and 4 and leave the rest weak. That is how the metre actually moves, and once the shape is in your ear the phrasing stops being something you calculate from the notation.

Before you start using rubato

Rubato — stretching and compressing the pulse for expression — is everywhere in the romantic repertoire, and it is only convincing from a player who has a solid pulse underneath. Without one it does not read as expression, it reads as unsteadiness.

So the order matters. First make the piece stable against the click from beginning to end. Then turn the click off and stretch deliberately. Done that way, the time you borrow gets paid back somewhere, which is what rubato is supposed to mean.