Tag: practice

Make friends with your metronome

Nicole Neal5 Comments

That pyramid-shaped clicking device, which back in the day used to be a hefty, wooden, wind-up device (well they still are…) and cost at least half an arm, if not a full one plus a leg too. These days anyone with a smart phone, which is pretty much most folks, can have their very own metronome for just the price of a coffee. I personally use a metronome app on on my iPhone called Tempo – a very useful little app indeed.

Metronome with guitar
Metronome with guitar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So with these kinds of apps out there at literally the touch of a button for a minimal cost, there is absolutely no excuse not to be using one!

So why are they so important?

The metronome is a great indicator of the following of whether:

  1. you’re actually playing in time
  2. that interesting rhythmic bit in bar 42, that set of grace of notes, that syncopation,  that triplet or quintuplet, or that bit you could swear blind is really in time actually is in time
  3. you do really know what you’re playing – when playing everything at the same tempo one can realise where there are perhaps a few stumbling blocks or little “knots’ in the music that need a bit of attention and teasing out
  4. you’re speeding up because a section is “easy” or perhaps the nature of the music lends itself to that if you’re not careful
  5. you’re slowing down to allow for a technical challenge rather than for the purposes of expression that you might be doing when playing without the metronome

Well, I most definitely advocate for my students to use a metronome whilst practicing scales, at least a couple of times of week, particularly to engender that sense of pulse, resisting the urge to speed up and ensuring evenness between the notes. The metronome is also particularly useful in training one to play faster tempi whilst maintaining evenness, for example, in scales.

To do this I set the metronome at a comfortable tempo and play the scale at that tempo. I then notch it up say two or three beats per minute, and play the scale at that tempo – always listening to the sound quality I’m creating of course – and being aware of the evenness of the notes. I then continue to keep notching up two or three beats per minute until I notice I’m tripping up – this reveals where there may some attention required to the movement of the left hand, the right hand and/ or the two in combination.

I don’t advocate, however, that the metronome should be used all of the time. Far from it.

Once that feel of the tempo and the pulse in a scale or a piece has become more engrained, and that playing straight ahead is mastered, then it’s time to put the metronome away. That’s when you can begin to shape and refine the music you’re making, the subtle pushes and pulls in phrases, the rubato, the rits and the ralls.

But you’ve first got to know where your boundaries are, so you can push beyond them. Is it time you made friends with your metronome?

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Repetition is the mother of skill

Nicole Neal5 Comments
English: A classical guitar (front view) Franç...
Photo credit: Wikipedia

If if you want to get good at something, like really good, then you’re going to need to do lots of that something. Then some more. And then some more. And then some more again.

It is said that to obtain mastery of a particular skill you need to spend around 10,000 hours practicing, working, honing, paring, polishing and tweaking. That’s a lot of hours! If you do the maths, breaking it down – if you want to master something like, say….ooooh the guitar, in 10 years, you’ve got to be putting in 1000 hours of practice each year. That equates to around 83 hours per month or around 19 hours per week. Bugger! Best get practicing!

Whatever the truth is behind the “10,000 hours” thing, what we can take from this is that, fundamentally, if we want to progress, to develop and to become better and better, continually improving on the instrument, there is one thing that we need to do.

Practice.

Actually I lie. There are two things.

(1) Practice.

(2) Do it regularly and consistently.

To coin a couple of well-worn phrases, we are what we repeatedly do and repetition is the mother of skill.

The behaviours and actions that we repeatedly carry out (which we of course have absolute choice about carrying out) indicate the things that we value, and so we come to embody those action. You may want to ask yourself, do your practice behaviours and actions indicate that you value your practice?  Do they indicate that you do the practice?! Are you happy that your actions reflect what you’re repeatedly (or otherwise) doing?

And what is it you’re repeating? Regularly and consistently practicing? And what, within your practice are you repeating? The same mistakes, just playing though, repeating and embedding “same old”? Or really listening to how you’re playing and practicing in new and improved ways of playing? Teasing out that technical knot and practicing in and repeating that awesome new left or right hand fingering, that dynamic, that movement of the phrase?

If repetition is the mother of skill, what are your repetitive actions giving life to?

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