piano addict blog

Have you ever known someone who just couldn’t play with a metronome no matter the tempo? Sorry. That’s definitely a DUH question. It’s a frustrating problem to have no matter your age or level. It presents quite a challenge for teachers as well. Over the years, I have picked up a lot of strategies and used them with mixed success. We’ve started slowly with simple pieces or scales. We’ve clapped, walked, tapped, and more. We’ve conducted. We’ve counted aloud with various counting systems. We’ve used random tempos, accelerandos, and ritardandos. 

This fall, I had to dive headfirst into this problem yet again. I have a new young adult student who just can’t stay with a metronome. She can keep with some sections of her piece at her own comfortable but messy speed though. Interestingly, she doesn’t have any trouble at all clapping or tapping her foot with any one tempo or even with changing tempos. Defeated, she said “All my teachers have tried to teach me and I’ve just never been able to do it.” Suddenly, I thought maybe, instead of starting slowly and working upwards to build steadiness, we need to be backwards about this. 

So, I asked her to spend 5 minutes a day with that short passage. We knew it was going to be frustrating for her and I didn’t want to go overboard. At mm 96, she could stay fairly well with the beat and even get back on if she lost it a little. So, we started there. Then I asked her to back up to 92 and when she could do that back up one more tempo to 88 and continue getting slower one tempo at a time. I also suspected that her brain needed to connect the click with the feel of her far away fingertip pressing the key bottom so we worked on that with one key until she was confident she could be steady at 96. We used her pointing finger because that is our natural most accurate human gesture. 

I expected that she would probably be able to make it pretty well to 88. I was ok that there would be some wavering and a few do-overs at the next lesson. I thought I might also get a few expressive emails about her trials. Silence. I became worried she had lost the courage to face the demon metronome again after all her years of failure.

She walked into her lesson flying high. “Look what I did! I got all the way to 76!!!,” she practically shouted. She couldn’t wait to show me. She still needed to start at 96 each day but she could do that passage at every tempo down to 76 and only lost it a couple of times. “Can I try this passage this week?,” she asked. It was a little long and she was not as well able to stay steady at 96 as with the previous passage so we shortened it a bit. I asked her to spend 2 minutes on the old passage and 5 on the new. 

By golly, she had that second passage well in hand by her next lesson. We will see where this ultimately goes. She is still a long way from being able to stay with any random tempo or to start at 60 and work her way up on an unfamiliar piece. But, she is no longer afraid of the demon metronome and has gained a boatload of confidence. I think she will keep improving simply because now she thinks she can. 

For more on metronome practice check out my post Does Metronome Practice Work For Everyone.

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