How to practice with a metronome

Short answer: start slowly enough to play the passage cleanly, stay there until it feels easy, then raise the tempo a little. The metronome is there to show you where the beat is, not to push you.

Find your starting tempo

Take the hardest bar of the piece, not the first bar. Lower the tempo until you can play that bar three times without a mistake and without tensing up. That is your starting number. It is often far lower than you expect, and that is fine.

If you don't know the tempo of a recording, tap along with it on the tap tempo button for a few beats. It averages the last few taps, and a pause starts it over.

Raise it in small steps

1. Play the passage at the starting tempo until it is clean twice in a row.
2. Add 2 to 5 BPM. Smaller steps suit fast passages, where a step of 5 BPM is harder than it looks.
3. If it falls apart, go back to the last clean tempo instead of forcing it.
4. Note the tempo you reached. Tomorrow, start a little below that.

Some players like to reach a few BPM above the target, so the real tempo feels comfortable. There is no fixed rule for how quickly you should progress, so judge by how clean it sounds.

Subdivide when the beat feels empty

At slow tempos the gaps between clicks are long, and it's easy to rush or drag inside them. Turn on eighth notes, triplets or sixteenths so the click fills the gap. The tempo doesn't change, you just hear more of the grid. Once it feels steady, turn the subdivision off again and see if you can still place the notes.

Let the click do less

A metronome on every beat can become a crutch. As you improve, ask it for less:

• Click on 2 and 4. For swing, funk or pop, treat the click as the backbeat. Set a 2-beat bar at half your tempo: to practice at 120, set 60 and feel each click as beat 2 or beat 4.
• Mute some beats. Silence a beat or two in the bar, and check that you land together with the click when it comes back. In the online metronome, tap a beat to change it to accent, normal or silent.
• Only beat one. Mute everything but the first beat of the bar, so you hold the time on your own.

Odd and compound meters

In 3/4 or 4/4, each click is usually a quarter note. In 6/8, you normally feel two big beats of three eighth notes each. You can set that up in two ways. One is a 2-beat bar with triplets, where BPM counts the big beats. The other is 6/8 with accents on beats 1 and 4, where BPM counts eighth notes. So 60 big beats per minute is 60 BPM the first way and 180 BPM the second, since each big beat holds three eighth notes.

For 7/8 or 5/8, accent the first note of each group. A common way to count 7/8 is 2+2+3, so put accents on beats 1, 3 and 5.

What the tempo words mean

Italian tempo marks are older than metronomes, and they describe character as much as speed. Sources give different ranges and they overlap. This is the table TuneLog uses to name a tempo, as a starting point only. A composer's own number, when there is one, comes first.

Common mistakes

• Practicing only at full speed. Mistakes repeated at speed get learned too.
• Chasing the number. A tempo you can only reach with tension isn't really yours yet.
• Never turning it off. Music breathes. Once the notes are secure, play without the click and listen.