Metronome

Start at a tempo where you can play the passage cleanly every time, even if that is far below the target. Play it several times in a row without mistakes, then raise the tempo by a few BPM. When mistakes creep in, go back to the last clean tempo: speed built on sloppy repetitions only rehearses the mistakes.

Listen for the click disappearing. When a note lands exactly on the beat it covers the click and you barely hear it; when you are early or late, the click sticks out. Aim to make the click vanish rather than chase it.

Once the tempo feels steady, take some of the help away. Silence beats by tapping their lights: leave only beat 1 of each bar, or in 4/4 keep only beats 2 and 4, the way jazz players practice swing with the click on the backbeat. You keep the time in between; the click only tells you whether you kept it.

The metronome clicks once for every beat of the bar, and the bottom number of the time signature says which note gets the beat. In 4/4 the four clicks are quarter notes; in 6/8, 7/8, 9/8 and 12/8 every click is an eighth note. The first click of each bar is accented, and in the longer bars the start of each group is marked too, so you can hear how the bar divides.

In 6/8 you hear six clicks per bar, but the music is usually felt in two big beats of three. If a score gives the tempo as a dotted quarter note, multiply by three: dotted quarter = 60 means 180 BPM in 6/8. Or set 2/4 with triplet subdivision at 60 BPM: the louder clicks are the two big beats and the triplets fill in the six.

Odd meters are easier with the grouping you actually play. 7/8 is set up as 2+2+3; if your piece goes 3+2+2, tap the beat lights so the accents fall on beats 1, 4 and 6 instead. 5/4 comes grouped 3+2, the count of the jazz standard Take Five.

Slow tempos are harder to play steadily than fast ones, because the gap between clicks is long and easy to rush. Subdivision fills that gap with quieter clicks: eighths add one click after every beat, triplets add two and sixteenths add three. The beat itself stays louder, so you always know where you are.

Match the subdivision to the passage. Eighths and sixteenths expose uneven runs and strumming patterns; triplets lock in shuffles, swing and anything built on groups of three. Once a passage feels solid, turn the subdivision off and see whether it still sits on the beat. The goal is to carry the subdivision in your head.

Try the three sounds against your own instrument. The right one is the sound you can still hear clearly at a moderate volume while you play, so you are not tempted to turn it up until it drowns everything else.

Italian tempo words are older than the metronome and describe character as much as speed, so the ranges below are approximate: composers, editions and styles differ. The metronome shows the marking that matches the current BPM as a quick guide.

The mechanical metronome was patented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in 1815, building on a design by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel. That is why printed music still writes tempos as M.M. ♩ = 120: Maelzel's Metronome, 120 quarter notes per minute. Beethoven was among the first composers to add metronome marks to his music.