Metronome Practice Room Techniques

Metronome Practice Part I

One of the standard admonitions to young drummers (older drummers, too!) is, "Practice with a metronome!" Often, this is translated into taking a metronome, setting it to click on every beat, and then practicing whatever materials are at hand. However, there's far more that can be done when practicing with a metronome. This article will address some of the creative possibilities available for metronome practice.

The Basic Click

There's a great deal of benefit to be gotten from practicing to a metronome clicking on the beat. It offers a steady reference point, and let's a musician know if he or she is speeding up or slowing down in relation to that steady reference. Additionally, many recording studio situations call for drummers to put down their tracks against a click track, meaning that playing with a metronome not only is a good tool to strengthen one's sense of time, but in and of itself it is a valuable skill to have. The ability to play to a click, while still sounding musical, is a skill that can help drummers get work, and get called back for more work in the future.

Developing one's own "internal metronome"

In terms of developing one's sense of time - an "internal metronome" - playing to a metronome can be valuable, but it can also become a crutch. Many drummers, when practicing to a metronome, turn the volume up so that they can hear the click over their playing. However, I'd suggest turning down the volume. Set it just low enough that, if you hit something at the same moment as the click - a cymbal, snare drum, or any other component of the kit - you'll drown out, or "mask" the sound of the click. However, if your playing is just a little bit ahead of or behind the click, that "masking" won't take place, and you'll hear that click. Basically, you'll only hear the click as a reminder when you're not keeping steady time; when you're in synch with the click, you won't hear it. As a result, you'll develop the ability to stay in tempo without actually hearing the click, making it easier to stay in tempo when not playing along a metronome.

Here is a graphic corresponding to a metronome set to click on every beat. The "X" indicates when a click takes place, in this case corresponding to each beat:



Many drummers have noticed that it can be tougher to keep slower tempos steady, than it is to keep faster tempos steady. The reason for this is, there's more time (space) between each beat, meaning there's a greater opportunity to err one way or the other. This can be exploited in the practice room, to help develop one's internal metronome. Program the metronome to click once every other beat, rather than every beat - challenge yourself to keep larger and larger chunks of time steady and consistent. The metronome isn't providing as many "reminders" of where the tempo is, meaning that the player bears even more of a responsibility in keeping the tempo steady.



Some of you may be thinking, "I can't 'program' my metronome - I can just set the tempo, but it clicks on every beat." With a little bit of math, you can adapt any metronome to "click on every other beat." If you're practicing at 90 beats per minute, set your metronome to 45 beats per minute. You now have a click that sounds at half the previous tempo, which is the same as once every two beats at 90 beats per minute.

(This is, of course, limited by how slowly one can program one's metronome - most of the basic metronomes I've seen can't be set below forty-something beats per minute. In the Part II of this article, we'll expand on some of the ideas presented in Part I, using a drum machine or sequencer.)

Another option is to have the metronome click somewhere other than "beat one." The beats of a measure (where one counts "one, two, three, four," etc.) are usually felt more strongly than the off beats. The click of a metronome does not have to coincide with the beats of a measure. If a metronome is set to 90 beats per measure, it'll still click that same tempo even if one arbitrarily assigns the click to the off beats (the "ands") of the measure, like this:



However, since we're not hearing the click right on the beat, where we're used to hearing it, this approach helps to strengthen one's internal metronome, by removing the "crutch" of having the click on the beat.

We can also combine the previous two approaches, set the metronome to half the intended tempo, and assign the click to every other offbeat, in this case the "ands" after beats one and three:



The metronome is still serving as a reference point, but not the way we're used to.

Thus far, everything presented in this article can be done with any metronome. There are still other practice room techniques available, if one replaces their metronome with a drum machine or sequencer - and that will be covered in Part II of this article.