Metronome

How to actually use one

Set it slower than feels necessary. The point is to play a passage with no mistakes and no hesitation, and if you can do that at the tempo you chose, the tempo was too fast to be teaching you anything.

When a passage is clean three times in a row, move up by four or five, not twenty. Progress that feels boringly slow is the kind that sticks.

Try putting the click on beats two and four rather than every beat, once you are comfortable. It forces you to keep time yourself between the clicks, and it is much closer to how a drummer's backbeat feels. There is more on where that backbeat comes from on reading a drum grid.

The Italian words

Tempo markings on printed music are words, not numbers, because they predate the metronome. The rough equivalents:

The ranges overlap and different editors disagree, which tells you these were always descriptions of character rather than of speed. Every melody in our song catalogue carries a real number, so you can set this to the tune you are learning and play along.