Metronome Methods For The Unconvinced - PHH 050

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan, and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I, although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to the show. Listen for a moment. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

The constant click of a metronome could conceivably drive a person crazy. I guess now I am now. Although I wasn't always a metronome fan. Though this may sound crazy to some of you, the metronome is my favorite practice tool because it helps me fix errors, create flow, and it gives me time to play a piece or a tricky passage correctly.

I realize that this may not be your experience with the metronome. Maybe your feeling about it is more like this. If you've seen the classic movie Ben Hur, you probably already know what I'm going to talk about. But if you haven't, let me set the scene for you. At one point in the movie, our hero Judah Ben Hur is a galley slave on a Roman ship, chained to an oar with several other slaves. The entire hold of the ship is filled with men chained to oars, and they are the engine of that ship. Now, in order for the slaves to generate enough power to move the ship, it's essential that they row in a coordinated way. So at the very front of the galley is a man beating a drum. Boom, boom, boom. He sets the tempo for the rowers. So when the ship enters into battle, the drummer picks up the pace. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Now, slaves collapse left and right. They're trying to keep up. There's a guy with a whip. Now, maybe that sounds more like your metronome experience, only without the sweat and the starvation and the whip. Right? Well, now, apparently this depiction in the movie isn't completely historically accurate, but it may be accurate enough if your metronome feels like a slave driver. Actually, the Latin word they Use in the movie for the drummer is hortatur. Our word exhort, meaning to urge or advise or encourage, comes from the same root, so hortator can mean encourager. You may not be ready to think of your metronome as a friendly encourager just yet, but I hope to give you a glimpse of that today. We'll talk about the best use of the metronome, and it's not speeding things up. Plus, I will share two of my favorite ways to use the metronome, the ways that I use to help me play more musically. Even better, if you've never been able to use a metronome before, you'll learn exactly how to do it. That's right. I will actually teach you how to work with your metronome and why it's important. So stick with me here. I can pretty much guarantee that you will love this, so have some faith and we'll get to that in just a moment. First, I want to tell you it's, you know, the spring has sprung around here. Here it is. It's already May, and you're probably thinking ahead to summer. I know I am. Well, this is a great time to start planning for summer. To start planning to use the time that you're, that you're going to have. Summer can often be a slower time, right? And you may be thinking, you may be all energized by the springtime and you're thinking this would be a great time to get stuff done. Well, it is a great time to get stuff done, but you're only going to get stuff done if you really work with a plan. So I want to offer you my free PDF about the 90 Day Goals plan. Now I talk about goals and in fact, way back in September we had a whole series about goal setting. But just to refresh your memory, the way I think we need to set goals for our heart playing is to think about what it is we want to do. Give ourselves a time frame and then break that goal down into little mini goals that will help us measure our progress along the way. This is exactly the process that I outline in my Spark journal. It's the process that we use with our certified coaching students. It's the process that I use with my Gold Circle students. And if you've ever set goals for anything else, even if it's not music or harp related, it's pretty much the same process. We're going to find one thing, and I urge you, don't try to do too much. Find one thing that you really want to accomplish in the next 90 days or so, right through the beginning of the summer, and figure out what that one thing is. And then break it down into three, what I like to call progress goals. So that if you want to learn a piece, maybe your first progress goal is to learn the first half of the piece and the second progress goal is to learn the second half. You know, there are lots of different ways to do it, and whatever learning method works for you, that's what you use. But the idea is that you set your goal and then break it down into more manageable chunks. So this is a quick little, you know, two page PDF and it will help you do just that. You may also want to consider, for example, thinking about your goal in terms of one of the three big growth areas. Do you need to grow your technique or strengthen your musicianship or add to your repertoire? So you might want to think about one of those areas to, to improve, and then think of one way you want to improve it and make that your goal. So there are some instructions. It's pretty minimal, but that's because I don't want to overcomplicate this process for you. So this PDF is free. Just there's a link in the show notes and you can just click on that link and it will take you to the page where you can get your 90 day goals plan. And then when you start working with your plan, please shoot me an email. Me know how it's going. Let me know if you have questions about the goal setting or if you know if you experience progress with it or if you don't. And you can send those emails to me@podcastartmastery.com and I will get them that way. All right, so that's about goals. Well, maybe your goal is learning to work with the metronome. If so, we're going to get a great start on that starting point right now. Since people have been playing music, people have understood the importance of the beat. And I'm not just talking about the beat for Roman galley slaves here. Right. But the beat is something we relate to at a real visceral level, almost at a primal level. It's the thing that allows us to connect with a piece of music. Now, granted, there are some pieces of music that don't have a steady kind of a pulse, and that's what can make them so interesting, so atmospheric, maybe even so unsettling when we hear them. But most music is organized around a steady beat. And most of the time those steady beats are organized into measures. And that's where our meter comes from, our time signatures, you know, like three, four or four. Four. That's the way the beat is organized into repeating patterns. But the beat itself is the primary component in this whole process. And that's why having a steady beat in our playing is so important. It allows a listener to connect with our music and to understand what they're hearing. That organization of the beat is the way a listener connects to what we do. So that when we play with a steady beat beat, it's easier for them to hear it and understand it. If our beat is hesitant or changes or, you know, fluctuates or whatever word you want to use for it, then it unsettles the listener, too. So while we don't want our music to be robotic, we don't want to, you know, keep a steady beat at the expense of the musicality of a piece. If it isn't steady, it isn't musical. We have to start from there. So that's why the metronome has been so important since it's been invented. I mean, people trace it back to a pendulum that Galileo observed. There was a metronome designed by a French musician in the late 1600s. The metronome, as we know it is a 19th century invention from around 1816 or so. The man who patented it, which in another sort of interesting side story, he was not the man who invented it, but he got the patent on it. And his name was Johan Nepomuk Melzel M A E L Z E L And he was the one that first came up with the metronome, sort of the way we envision it, right? With that wooden pyramid and the pendulum that swings back and forth with that little metal slide. Of course, metronomes have come a long way since then, but that was the technology that allowed the metronome to not only keep a steady beat, but to be adjustable so musicians could practice at different tempos and practice matching the beat.

Now, it was such an advance in music study at the time that a lot of composers were really taken with it, notably Beethoven. Beethoven is.

Pretty much known as an adopter, an early adopter, if you will, of the metronome. In fact, he also decided, once the metronome was around, to give his pieces metronome markings. And in fact, he even pledged to do away with the indefinite kind of markings like andante or allegretto, those kinds of things. So he was an early adopter. Now, not everybody went along with the idea of the metronome because, as you know, it's wonderful to keep a steady beat. But that's not the only important thing in music. So there were plenty of composers and musicians all through time. You are not alone who resisted the metronome and had very ambivalent, if not absolutely negative feelings about it. Brahms was one of those. Brahms was known to have said that some of his good friends talked him into putting metronome marks into his music. But he says, I myself have never believed that my blood and a mechanical instrument go well together. Meaning that his personal preference and his passion, Brahms music, is sort of noted for that didn't seem to reduce itself to a mechanical number very well.

With that said, Brahms's music wouldn't sound the same without much of it having a steady beat. Right. So while you don't want that steady beat all the time, we need a steady beat. But the metronome's primary job is really not for that. It's very helpful, and it can help us find those kinds of rhythm mistakes. But I think that the metronome has really a more important role as a learning tool. It will teach you to learn how to listen. One of the complaints that I hear from students who are having trouble working with the metronome Is that they find the metronome distracting. They can't stick with it. They can't figure out how to stay with the beat. And that's simply because they haven't learned this sort of external listening. I call it listening with your third earth. I know that sounds a little peculiar, but what I mean is this. Most of the time. Let's forget about the metronome for a moment. Most of the time when we're playing, we listen to what we're doing. We listen to the notes. We listen to the rhythm. We listen to our fingers, our finger noise, all those things. There are so many things to pay attention to. And we're very involved in listening to what we're doing.

But what that means is that we've created this little world, this little shell inside which we are operating.

The problem with this is that for our music to flow, for our music to have that steady beat, for our music to fit with somebody else who might be playing with us, it needs to have that steady beat. And we need to be responsible to the pulse. Now think about how different that is. It's not about playing the right notes or the right fingers. It's about playing at the right time.

That's not the emphasis that most of us think of. When we think about the music that we're playing. We're trying so Hard to get things correct, that we're not thinking about how that has to fit with a composer's idea or with a steady beat or maybe even with somebody else. Like if we're playing with a flutist or a singer, or if we're playing in a harp ensemble or in an orchestra, those things are really important because you can't ask your flutist to hang on just a second. I need to slow down here because the fingering's tough, right? That's. That's not what we do. That's not how the music works. But when you think about a statement like that, hey, slow down here. We got to slow down, because this is a little bit tricky for me, and I need some extra time to push this pedal. Well, we're asking anyone who might be listening to the music to understand that, you know, there's something more important than the music, and it's our pedal change. It's a little bit like being at a play. Think about what it's like to watch a play. You're in a theater. The theater's darkened, and you're absorbed into the world of the characters, right? They're there on the stage before you, but you're not thinking about them as actors and human beings and people who might be, oh, gosh, I'm so hungry, or, I hope I remember my next line, or why didn't that other actor remember his line? Or, where's that. That paper that I have to pick up? That little bit of business that's so important on the stage? We don't notice any of that. We just go along with the story and are engrossed by it. And so if an actor flubs a line or, you know, one of those classic things, right, the actor is there stuck on stage, and they're waiting for a phone to ring, and the prop person isn't there to ring the phone at the right time, and they're sort of standing there being awkward, and all of a sudden, the audience is drawn away from the story, and they see the actor as a regular old person who's on stage acting instead of the character that they were there to portray. This is very similar to what happens when we don't keep a steady beat. Someone who is listening to our music hears our struggle and not the flow of the music. So if you've had trouble getting your music to flow, it might not be because you're playing wrong notes or pushing wrong levers or anything like that. It might be because you're not keeping a steady beat. And the Only way to do that is to have that sort of third ear that listens externally, that listens actually not to what we're doing so much as what we're creating. It changes your listening focus from that little room, it's just you and your harp, to what's actually coming out, what actually happens when you're playing. It changes your focus from the action to the result of that action. And the metronome is a great training tool for that. Now think about what happens before we get to how the metronome can help you do that. Let's think about, again why this would be important.

If you have to play as part of an ensemble, say part of a harp circle, and you're all playing together, if you're working so hard at your part that you're not listening to what's going on around you, you might not be playing at the same time as everybody else.

And then you won't end together. Right. It won't sound good while you're going on, but you certainly won't get to the end at the same time. So that while you're playing in an ensemble, you are actually paying attention to what you're doing, but perhaps even more, you're paying attention to keeping up with the rest of the group. And that can be very difficult because it's not how we practice. When we practice, we're sitting there by ourselves. We don't have the rest of the group. Now, if you've ever tried to play along with a video, maybe even one of my videos, like in the 8:2 today course or something, you notice right away that your attention has to be somewhere else. It can't just be on what you're doing. It also has to be on what you're hearing. And that's the place we want to go. And the metronome is an easy way to start. Okay, you're saying so it sounds like a hard way. Well, let me tell you how I suggest we do this. I had another harp teacher once get in touch with me and say that she had a student who absolutely couldn't work with the metronome, and she was beginning to feel that the student had no sense of rhythm. Now, she didn't tell me this, but I have a feeling that the student probably also thought that the student had no sense of rhythm. But that's really not usually the case, especially for somebody who's been sticking with playing the harp for a while. If you had no sense of rhythm, you would have quit long ago.

But the student didn't have the skill to match the metronome. And that's what I decided was the likely cause of the issue. And so this is what I recommended. And this is sort of what I'm going to recommend for you, too. If you find it difficult to play with a metronome, the simplest thing to do is to start with a very easy scale. You know, one octave, something so simple that you don't have to think about it.

And then just match each note of the scale to the click of the metronome. Don't worry about fingering, don't worry about tone, don't worry about technique. Just match. Now, I'm going to. Let me get a little bit more detailed about that. The first step in matching the metronome is really just to listen. So put the. Put the metronome on something nice and relaxing, something, you know, like 60 beats per minute. That's a second, right? There are 60 seconds in a minute. So 60 is telling you that that's a click every second. And that might feel kind of comfortable for you. Maybe you want to go a little slower, Maybe it's more comfortable for you a little faster. But find something that's quite comfortable, and then just listen to the metronome, listen to it, and then start counting along with it. One, two, one, two. Now, notice I did not bring a metronome along for this podcast because I was afraid that if you were metronome phobic.

You might not want to hear the click. So I have my imaginary metronome on, but you'll have to use your own. Okay, so here we go. So imagine my metronome is clicking and I'm listening to it. Just click. Think about that. You're just listening to it, and you're not listening to it, pretending it's Chinese water torture or something. You're listening to it for the idea that it's just steady. Just steady. Now, your job is going to be to match your counting to the metronome, and that requires you less even to listen, although part of it will be listening. But to predict, right? To use that steady, constant, consistent span of time to predict when the next click will be and then to meet the metronome at that click. Not to hear the click and then count, but to predict it and meet it. So if you hear the click, and then you're going to count with it. One, two, one, two. Very simply, one, two, one, two. Then try playing. You can play a scale, you can play one string, but do the same thing. And I suggest that you count with it, even if you're just counting 1, 2, very simply, because it will help keep you aware of what you're doing. If you do it without counting, without counting aloud, I mean, you will be missing something. You'll be more likely to miss the beat. Actually, the counting aloud helps keep you focused. So you'll hear the metronome, you'll listen to it, you'll count with the metronome, and then you'll play and count with the metronome. The idea is to just keep this very simple. And then if you want to increase the difficulty, all you need to do is find an exercise or even a passage from a piece, something where you don't have to worry about the notes. Because remember, you're training your third ear. You're learning to listen, so you don't want to be so worried about your fingers and your pedals and all that technical kind of stuff that you stop listening. Whatever you're playing, your attention should be on matching the metronome. So if you have found the metronome distracting, this is probably why, and this is how you can fix it. So that would be my very first step in working with the metronome. But the metronome can do so much more. Now, we know that the metronome, we use it often to help us speed up. But what if we use it to help create time to slow things down for us so that we can play something correctly without worrying, without hesitation, without fumbling. The metronome can slow us down so that we can clean things up. So here's how to do that. Choose a passage, any kind of passage that you. That you play, you can work on a difficult one. But you might want to try this technique first on something that's not so difficult. So first thing to do is to find your usual tempo. You may need to experiment with the metronome a little bit. If you don't know, but find where you usually are playing it, then turn the metronome way slower, maybe even twice as slow, and play through that same passage, allowing the metronome to give you time to be correct. Now, I would suggest that when you turn the metronome slower, the first thing you do is listen to it and absorb the beat, and then start counting along with it, just the way you did in this just a moment ago in the other exercise. Start counting along with it. Match that beat. Then start thinking about what you're going to play and hear in your head how that's going to fit with the beat. Do it in your head first because you won't be playing wrong notes in your head. You'll be figuring out how it's going to fit with the metronome at this new tempo. When you can hear it, then begin to play it and play through that passage again, allowing the metronome to give you the time you need to do it correctly. Think about it as, you know, sort of slow motion, right? We're doing everything slower, but we're getting everything in the right place. By the way, this is a terrific technique for hands together practice, by the way, so you can use that. Now, if your metronome is so slow that it's really hard to match the beat, then, you know, then go put your metronome on the next slowest note value. So, in other words, maybe you don't turn your metronome down from your. From your usual tempo. You leave it at the same tempo, but you make that click the eighth note, perhaps, instead of the quarter note, right? That way you'd be playing one note for every two clicks. One quarter, right. If your click is the eighth note, then a quarter note would take two clicks. So that will slow you down, too.

So that's another. Another way to do that. Um, and depending on how fast or slow your usual tempo is, you might find one or the other of those to work better for you. But this will remove the frenzy, remove the hurry from your playing, and it will help you feel really coordinated, feel confident and secure, because you'll have enough time to get where you need to go with your fingers to do all those other things, to do dynamics, to. To do levers and petals correctly. The metronome will give you time. I know it's a radical thought, right? But it's a fabulous technique. Now I'll leave you with one. One more metronome little method to try. The metronome can help you create flow, create smooth, seamless piece without hesitations and without bumps. This is the kind of thing I call continuity. Um, and it. The metronome will help you get there this way. Um, first of all, we're going to have to make the beat the priority. This goes back to what I was talking about before, where you have to be more responsible to the beat, to the. To meeting the pulse of the music than you are to the notes itself.

If you make the beat, which is in this case, represented by the metronome, your priority, then this will help you learn to play past mistakes. It will help keep you from practicing in pauses or corrections or hesitations, because you're going to meet the metronome. Now, obviously, this method won't work until you're fairly comfortable matching the metronome, because it requires your third year. Absolutely. It requires you to let go of what you're playing and change your focus to making sure that you are staying with the pulse.

You can combine this, of course, with a more regular kind of practice where you're being very careful about getting everything right. But if you can continue to match the metronome and keep on playing even if you make mistakes, you are. Well, let's see. For one thing, you're creating great performance practice, right? Because you're learning to play past your mistakes. You're also giving yourself. If you're not up to performance preparation yet, you're giving yourself a real taste of what it's going to be like at that particular tempo. And you'll find the things that you need to practice to make that happen. You may find different sorts of mistakes or errors from the ones you originally thought were the issue. Just because the metronome is showing you what it's like to stay steady and to stay at the right tempo. So you can work on this by choosing any passage or even an exercise. You can set the metronome at any speed you like. If you're trying to eliminate hesitations, then be sure to use a very comfy tempo. Right? Because we want to give you enough time that you don't have to stop and hesitate to get there. And what you want to do is just play through that passage without stopping. Or you can do it differently, and you can put the metronome on, start from the beginning of the piece, and see how far you can play before you have to stop to line back up with the metronome.

Yeah. This means you'll have to pay attention to the metronome. You'll be paying more attention to the beat than you are to the notes you're playing.

This is a completely different way I know of thinking about your playing. It's putting something else besides all those correct notes and fingers and stuff. It's putting something else first. But this is a part of music, too. It's an important part, and you need to learn how to do it. So practicing this way at least some of the time is going to get you to that place where your music flows. Now, your goal with this should be eventually, of course, to get from beginning to end of a piece with the metronome. You shouldn't be fighting it. You want to be listening to the metronome and letting it help keep you moving forward. Instead of listening backward to whatever mistakes you made or, you know, worrying that you didn't get to the right place in time, just keep moving forward. I realize that's a lot to try to absorb here in one podcast, but if I could leave you with anything to help you start working with the metronome, it's that listening exercise. That's where all your work with the metronome is going to start. And once you can listen to it and play with it, then you've got a terrific tool to help you do all kinds of things with your music. But I would like to leave you with this final thought here. Remember, that tempo is not a number, right? Your personal tempo for any piece is where your technical ability and your personal musical idea for the piece meet and what you perceive as the composer's intention for that piece. So it's not about a metronome marking. Don't be a slave to a metronome marking. If, if you know it says 84 on the piece. If you can do 84, that's great. But maybe, maybe the piece feels better for you at 69 or 72 or 56 or maybe it feels better at 100 or 94, right? So don't be bound by those metronome numbers. Let them be a guide. But use your own personal musicality and your personal.

Accomplishment and comfort level with a particular piece. Guide you more.

Okay, now, next week on the podcast, I have a really interesting story to tell you, and I think it's going to help you look at your daily practice. Look at what you're doing in your heart, playing in a new way so that you can be sure that you're going to make progress. It's a story about the sacrificial leaf, and we'll be talking about that leaf next time and how you can use that story in your own harp playing. But for right now, I want you to remember that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. It. And all you have to do is play. All right, see you next time. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.