December 23rd, 2008 4:37 am
Metronomes have been around a long time to help musicians play in time and with a sense of rhythmic pulse. The original wind up triangular ones are still available but these are not recommended as they get slower when the spring winds down. They make nice mantle piece decorations though.
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Pictured here is the metronome that I have used for years, a good battery driven one. The battery lasts for years in these things. While there are some very fancy “beat machines” available with copious bells and whistles, for the purpose of developing a strong sense of rhythm and pulse, a basic model only is recomended. If you want to try out what a metronome can do for you for free, there are onlne versions.
Try here and read some more articles on using it. The dial is used to increase and decrease the click rate. The slider at the top left in this picture can be used to give a different click tone at the beginning of a new bar and can be adjusted for anything between two to six beats in a bar. |
Don’t use it, I never have. If you use this feature then you will be wasting time waiting for the first beat in the bar to come around each time you want to start fresh. Another dubious “feature” of metronomes is the flashing lights, in this case the row of LEDs across the top of the machine. The slider at top right can be used to have either two or eight lights flashing. Don’t rely on this either. When will metronome manufacturers wake up to the fact that it is the sound of the metronome that is important not the flashing lights?
The only feature you should be looking for in a metronome is how loud you can get it. For this reason I don’t like the tiny ones as they are simply not loud enough. Get one with the most annoying abnoxious click you can find. Metronomes are tools of the trade. Give me a hammer and chisel and I’ll be very good at wrecking a beautiful piece of wood, however in the hands of a skilled craftsman that piece of featureless wood will be transformed into a thing of beauty.
One of the very best recordings of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, for me, is Robert Marcellus with the Cleveland Orchestra under its long term coductor George Szell. I put a metronome on the recording just out of interest one day and apart from the two pauses in the first movement stayed right on crotchet = 120 without variance. Truly an astonishing achievement yet the recording has tremendous vitality and style and does not sound stayed or forced in any way. I’ll be doing a rant about the Mozart Concerto on another page.
One more thing to look out for: On a student’s metronome I discovered to my horror that the speaker producing the click was featured on the back of the unit, making it virtually inaudible. Using a metronome effectively takes concentration and perseverence so the following exercises will start simply and gather complexity towards the bottom of the page.
Use the following exercises to help you get started. These will consist of sound clips with music and explanations. I start with long notes. This gives the player little to do except count the beats out while playing the long notes, an essential skill.
These exercises will all be done at crotchet = 100 so set your own metronome to this speed to emulate the following. This speed indication means that there are 100 crotchets every minute. Always give yourself a whole bar of counting (in this case count to four, in time with the metronome) in your head before you play, and take a breath on the last beat of the count in bar. They all use the note “E” which is the first note to learn the fingering of when learning the clarinet. Click on the play buttons to hear performances with count-ins of four beats.
Exercise 1
This exercise consists of four bars of common time (4/4). Each bar has only one semibreve in it. Take a breath on the third click of the introductory four clicks and don’t take another one until after you have finished the four bars. Each semibreve should start with a strong sound and taper off gently at the end of each four clicks. 
Exercise 2
This exercise consists of four bars of common (4/4) time. Each bar has two minims. The last bar is a semibreve. In other words we are going twice the speed with the same metronome click rate.
Exercise 3
This exercise consists of four bars of common (4/4) time. Each bar has four crotchets and the last bar is a semibreve. The metronome speed remains the same for each exercise but the music sounds like it’s getting faster as the note values halve each time.
Exercise 4
This exercise consists of four bars of common (4/4) time. Each bar has eight quavers and the last bar is a four beat semibreve. Aim for a “bouncy” quaver pulse; imagine patting a basketball low down near the ground.
Exercise 5
This exercise uses the rhythm of “Jingle Bells” but still keeps the same note as previous exercises. Metronome speed still at crotchet = 100.
Exercise 6
Let’s spice up Jingle Bells and make it sound more like the original. To do that we need to be able to play semiquavers at crotchet = 100. Here are three bars of semiquavers to get us ready to play Jingle Bells in a more interesting way. To play semiquavers acurately at this tempo I believe that a slight pulse on the first of each group of four will help to focus the rhythm.
Exercise 7
Yet another rhythm you need to practise is the dotted quaver-semiquaver combination. This is one of the harder rhythms to get sounding right. This exercise consists of four bars again, this time with dotted quaver semiquaver groupings.
A dot after a note adds half its original value onto itself, so a dotted quaver is the length of three semiquavers tied together. Dots are a shorthand way of writing rhythms that would look too complicated written out in full. The trick is to get the semiquaver sounding just before the next beat of the metronome.
Exercise 8
Dotted quavers with crotchets in the same bar. When crotchets are combined with dotted quavers, make the sounding length of both notes equal and try to make both notes have the same weight. Imagine the Imperial Stormtroopers’ March from The Empire Strikes Back.
Exercise 8b
In fact, let’s have a look at the rhythm underlying that famous theme. It is very similar to the simplified version above and also around the same tempo. There is good use of silence which can be just as powerful as notes in making rhythms work as seen in the second stave where the quaver rests are. These rests are on main beats in the bar.
Exercise 9
Now you are ready to make Jingle Bells sound better. This version combines rhythms from the above exercises, still at crotchet = 100.
I want to deal with trplets and other time signatures on a new page, so check out some more rhythms in the resource section of this topic.