The Mental Metronome

As of last Friday’s lesson, I’m officially shelving the first movement of the Bach and focusing on the third movement. This is good. I think I’ve accomplished as much as I can on the first movement for the foreseeable future, and I’ll progress faster on the third movement if my practice time isn’t any more divided than necessary.

One of the main things I was working on for the last couple of days was speeding up the third movement. And you know what? I think I used to have a more reliable sense of tempo than I do now.

In the old days, on occasions when I practiced with the metronome, I obviously had the experience with every passage of eventually hitting a tempo where I couldn’t keep up physically. However, as I ran through the passage, I always had a good sense of what the metronome was doing and where I was in comparison. I could stay on tempo mentally.

These days, even at tempos where I can physically keep up, I find myself straying from the prescribed tempo. Of course, I don’t want the end product to sound metronomic, but for the sake of working up the speed in practice, I want to be able to maintain consistency within a passage. I want to trust that I’m actually following the metronome without having to stay glued to every blink and click.  

So, pardon my bragging: How do I know that I used to have a good sense of tempo? Well, arguably this relates to pitch as much as tempo, but in my early teens, I started to notice the difference between the tempo of pop songs when I heard them on the radio and when I heard them on records played on my parents’ stereo. My parents didn’t believe me. I finally recorded “Stand By Me” on cassette from the radio, and recorded it again from the record played on their stereo, and timed the two recordings. (These recordings were from the same “original” recording, so they should have been identical.) It turned out that the record/cassette version was four or five seconds shorter--if I remember correctly--than the radio/cassette version. My family’s turntable just turned too fast. Drove me crazy. Again, that might relate to pitch too since the “faster” versions of songs were also higher pitched, but I swear that the tempo difference was what struck me.   

How or when did I lose that? Will it come back? One thing I’ve tried is letting the metronome run for a bit at each new tempo before I start to play. While it’s clicking away, I look at the music and tap a toe, mentally running through the passage first to try to fix the sound of it in my mind at that tempo. Then I actually play it at that tempo (or as close as I can). This seems to help in the short term to get something out of the metronome practice, but in the long term, I really want my old mental metronome back!

This (above) is the version upon which the experiment was performed. And like the espresso-sipping, NPR-listening, import-driving liberal I am, I really like this version too.