 Hi guys, this is Jason Zak from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to learn how to practice the piano or pretty much any musical instrument with the metronome focusing specifically on subdivisions. So you are not going to use the metronome just for its beats. You are going to yes, use it for the hit points but then practice music inside of it. We have done another lesson on using the metronome. It's a rather detailed lesson more on how to practice various things on the metronome. We leave that in the description so you could perhaps watch that lesson. It will be nice to watch that after this lesson actually. So check out the description later after watching this one. I am going to divide the lesson into a few topics. First of all, I am going to show you how to set up a metronome for practice. A lot of students have asked me this question. I will show you that. I will use an app. I will show you how you can do it in a way which works for your comfort zone. And then we look at how to actually practice it using a very simple set of music. Probably just a major chord, a minor chord, maybe a simple chord progression or two. And let's look at different subdivisions. Subdivisions is where you divide the beat into units. So you divide by two, divide by three or divide by four. And then we'll explore the challenges of practicing with this particular ecosystem. When you practice with subdivisions or otherwise, when you practice with the metronome, you kind of get a reality check. How good are you actually with respect to time? So we look at all the challenges involved using the metronome. Having said all that, the metronome is a very fun and inspiring tool. So I would urge you to use the metronome generally while practicing or composing or even improvising because it can motivate you or inspire you to create music. That's another interesting feature. So let's get cracking. Before we do, it'll be awesome if you could hit that bell icon and hit the subscribe button on our Nathaniel School YouTube channel. And you could also consider getting the notes of this lesson and other previous lessons with notation, my handwritten notes, MIDI files, backing tracks, wherever applicable, waiting for you on our Patreon page. Let's get cracking. First of all, how to set up this thing called the metronome. So first off, you could install this metronome app called ProMetronome which works perfectly fine on Android and iOS devices. It's also completely free and I think it's the best sounding one of the lot and it's useful on stage as well because it has a lot of pro features which you can purchase later. But for the most part, it's free. So the first thing I like to do is learn how to adjust the tempo. So you can do that with the slider and you have right now I'm adjusting it and I've set it up to 60 beats per minute. This is how it sounds at 60 beats per minute. So one, two, three, four, one. Now you could assume this to be four by four or the way I set it up, I can set it up without any accents. So what I mean by that is the metronome normally will come sounding like this with that higher pitch sound, right? The higher bell-like sound or the tick sound. So what you could do or what I like to do is first of all disable it and keep all the sounds of the metronome to be the same. So then you don't need to look at it, you're forced to or you don't need to look at this. You can just put it aside, put it in front of you and just play because you can assume what the one is. I don't think you need to know what the one is with a different sound unless you're recording or doing something more specific. So those are the basics of the metronome. Install the app, figure out the settings, learn how to adjust your tempo, time signature maybe but for the most part you can just set the tempo at whatever you feel and then try and play along. The next thing when you're setting up the metronome, before you start playing I would urge you to first move your body to feel the pulse. One, let's say it's a four by four song, so one, two, three, four, one, two. Before you even play the piano or guitar or whatever instrument, first try and count with it, one, two, three, four, one, two, three. You could also count it in a more animated way. What I mean by that, maybe the last four could be two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, sort of three staccatos and one legato, two, three, four, one. It brings you back into the cycle, three, four or maybe say the one, the first beat of the bar a little louder. So one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, there we go, four, one, three, four. So these are ways to make sure that you're moving to the pulse and you're feeling the time signature. The next thing you need to do before you start playing is the divisions of the beat. Try to figure out a way to say the beat divisions while the metronome is playing. So when we divide the beat, we can divide by two, we can divide by three and we can divide by four. When we say two, for the most part you can say one and two and three and four. So that and which you say will be a one and two, will be inside the metronome hit. So if this is what the beats are, two, three, four, the ands will go one and two and three and so the and is inside the hit point, right? One, two and three and four and one and and now if you divide by four, you can have four units within this one hit which you can vocalize as one e and two e and three e and four e and one e, one e and a. So and will be at the 50% mark, e would be at the 25% mark, a would be at the 75% mark. Let's see how that sounds. One e and two e and three e and four e and one. You could also move your head while you're counting to the pulse one e and two e and three e and four e. So we've gone from one and two and three and four and one and two and three all the way now to one e and two e and three e and four e and one e and two. Keep moving your body or at least your head one e and two e and three and then we can even divide by three. So to divide by three, you want to say something like one and two and three and four and one and two. And what helps me with three or triplets is to move my head sideways. That tends to help sway your head if that makes sense. So three, two, one, start one and two and three and four and one and two. And again, I'm saying the one with the on beats with a bit more intensity. One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and right. So before you even start playing with the metronome or the click track, just keep in mind that our body needs to move and we need to be able to count the subdivisions before playing. If you play a piano or any instrument in the real world, you're not going to align every note with every hit point of the metronome. It's not going to be that easy. For example, you may not want to play like this. It's not going to sound very interesting. So what we tend to do is we'll go inside it and this is at the beat level. This is at the subdivision, dividing by two, three, dividing by four and so on. So you get the point, I hope, where when you're playing the piano in the real world, you're not going to play every beat aligning with the metronome. This is something which people get wrong. Just to make sure that we are on the right track and not losing time, a lot of people will then tend to double up the speed. You will start playing at 120 or 240, which is ridiculous because the point of the metronome is to make you be an independent musician, to play better on time, so that everyone relies on you rather than the other way around. And before we get started with the piano part of the lesson, I just wanted to mention that when the metronome goes faster, it becomes more of a physical activity to get your hands aligned with or your muscles to be able to play at that particular speed. But it's a bit easier on the mind because you're less dependent on the metronome or you're less dependent on time. You're going more with your finger capability. However, if the metronome is slower, it becomes a lot more mentally grueling, so to speak. So learn the metronome at both fast speeds as well as slow speeds. Let's now get started on the piano with some music. So I have for you the G major chord. Very simple. G major is G, B, D. Now you could play this either B, D, G, D, G, B, those are its inversions. G, B, D, B, D, D, G, B, could also consider the G minor chord if you like the minor vibe. G, B, D, B, D, G, D, G, B, D, G, B, D, G, B, D, D, G, B, D, G, B, D, G, B, D, G, B, D, D. Okay. Now, practicing this with the metronome, what will be interesting is if we consider some arpeggio playing. So I'm going to take the metronome and demonstrate a very simple arpeggio phrasing for you to... So let's start by dividing by four. Then we'll go into dividing by three. So this would be one E and a two E and as we counted earlier, one E and a two E and so the drill would be take the G major chord and roll it. So what we call as an arpeggio pattern or an arpeggio roll. Now here's the thing. Your fingers are not able to play that speed. No problem at all. Let's do eighth notes instead, which will be, let's first count it one and two and three and starting one and so maybe start with eighth notes. And then go to sixteenths. Now at this particular point, you may want to pause the video and try it out for yourself with the metronome and just see if you're able to get it. Just see if you're able to align yourself with respect to the metronome. That's the point of this video. to just figure out what are the challenges of practicing with it and to ensure that you're actually using it well because sometimes we just do it for the sake of it. We don't learn or gain anything from the process. So when you practice with the metronome, what you need to do is get the consistency and the longevity. What I mean by that is don't just do the exercise and stop and say, oh, I'm fine with it. You need to do it for a period of time. My suggestion is if you're doing an exercise or a pattern, at least for 30 seconds. So look at the number of repetitions. I've already done it eight times. Now, if you pause the video somewhere during the lesson and if you've tried it out and if you found some problems along the way, let's figure out those problems. Address those problems. First of all, the two basic issues are you're running away from the metronome or you're running behind or you're lagging behind the metronome. Why are you lagging behind? Maybe the speed is too fast. So you'd need to then dial it down a notch. Maybe 60 is too fast. Maybe you'd want to go to 50 or 55. If you're speeding up, that doesn't mean you're playing faster or you're able to play faster or you need to dial it faster. No, that means that you're not in control over your vehicle. You're going to crash your car very soon. So you may be able to drive it about a few meters, few hundred meters, but you don't want to crash the car. You want to be consistent at the same speed or in this case, the whole song. So what you need to ensure is longevity, consistency, and so on. And this is an example. If you're lagging behind or racing, so this would be an example of racing. See, it's not. And now to get back, you have to. The best way is if you feel internally that you're not following it, you should just stop. You should not even try to recover. So that's my advice. So let's say you start fairly well. Now you rush or you make a mistake or two, just stop, maybe stop the metronome or keep the metronome running, take a breather, have a sip of water and then continue the mission. You want it to be consistent. Another challenge is you run, but you need to come back. Now you need to look at a few cues for that. The first thing is the one beat or the downbeat of the bar, which I told you earlier, which was so important. So as you play this, figure out which note is on the downbeat. If you look at this pattern, it's low, middle, high, middle, low, middle, high, middle. So my low note appears to be always at the downbeats. Let's just figure that out for one, two, three, four. At least I've designed the pattern that way. Three, four. So this thumb needs to. So even if you're rushing or lagging, just focus on the thumb. This sounds bad, but at least you're not, you're not leaving the click. There we go. So focus on the downbeat, focus on the one. And you should be good, actually. Four, one, two, three, four. If there are still some challenges involved, I would encourage you to alter the style or the vibe of each note which you're playing. Look at all the properties of musical notes in general. One is volume. So you can make one note louder with respect to the other. The other thing would be duration. One note could be shorter or longer with respect to the other or others. You could also look at altering your pitch. Maybe you need more pitch variations. So we look at all the three now and trust me, the inherent properties of sound itself will help you be more on time. Maybe you're not analyzing the changes of sound. It's almost like reading anything on a piece of paper. A, the paper will be of some kind of a color, usually white or black. And then the ink or the color or the writing pen which you use will always be a contrasting color. If it's a black background, you're probably going to write with a white or a lighter color and vice versa. So it's the same with music. You need to have a contrast within your brain. For all you know, the reason why you're not keeping time is because you don't have that the basics of what you need for your year, which is contrast. You need to have a strong beat and a weak beat, a loud beat, a soft beat, a long beat, a short beat, stuff like that or a high pitched beat and a low pitched beat. So let's look at that maybe again, this lesson is primarily focused on the challenge of playing on time with the metronome. And the rewards are plenty once you get this. So this is one of my probably very few lessons on YouTube, which is musically rather boring because I'm just going to take one chord throughout the lecture. But stick around, stick with me. This is more to improve your playing. You can do this with any of the other glamorous set of notes and melodies out there. So the first thing we look at is working with volume. And I'd encourage you to maybe play the one beat, one, two, louder or the down beats, one, two, three, play those loudly and all the other beats play those a bit softer. So one, two, remember we counted this at the beginning of the class. One, two, three, let's see how that can work. So I'm slamming my thumb. This is creating a smaller package or a smaller cycle in your brain. And human beings love cycles. Earlier, if the volume was more consistent, there's no cycle being created for the mind, right? So loud, soft, soft, soft, loud, loud at the ones. There we go. You could also say things like one, two, three. Say that loudly while you play. It'll motivate you to play that down beat louder. And hopefully your timing improves. Play along with me. If you wish, let's do eighth notes. Keep it simple. Down, down, down, loud. Now what is the other property of sound which you can adjust in your playing of the arpeggio? You can then make it legato and staccato. Legato would mean long note. Staccato would be shorter note. So let's try and play around with that with the click. So you may find it a bit of a tricky challenge at the beginning. But over time, again, you're setting up a cycle. Long, short, short, short, long, short, short, short. Legato, staccato, three times. So let's look at that. Why not do one staccato and then three legatos? Let's see how that works. You're just giving yourself a kind of a jolt to recycle the brain to eventually play better and group these things in smaller chunks rather than an endless stream of information. You can also adjust your pitch. So if you feel you're lacking timing, if you're running or lagging, you could then go and focus on that G note which you're starting with and change it. Believe it or not, you may think, oh, you're changing notes. Won't this make it more tricky? I think it'll make it easier from the point of view of timing because you're creating that distinction of notes which forces you to feel the subdivisions and play with the metronome. There we go. So variations of volume, variations of note duration and variations of pitch will further improve your metronome capability. And remember to start slow. 60 beats per minute is what I'm using for this lesson and let it be 60 itself. If you need it to be a bit faster or slower, well and good. And when you're practicing, it's always a healthy practice. If your goal is, let's say 60, try to start with 50, go a bit slower and then end up a little faster. Maybe 60 could end up with 80. So then you have that confidence to play your music in different speeds. So we also learned triplets at the beginning of the lesson when we were counting. Why don't we also try and play this arpeggio pattern as a triplet? So triplets again would be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and... There we go. 1 and 2 and... So I'm just doing GBDG. Enough of this G major. Let's make it G minor now. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and... To make this interesting, maybe you could play GBD with your thumb, index finger and middle finger. And for some nice contrast, pitch contrast, you could add the top G with your pinky. Create a swaying feel with your body. There we go. These are triplets. You could say 1 and 2 and 3. So there are three divisions within the pulse, which is running at the rate of 60 beats per minute. There we go. So this is what I want you to practice. I'd like you to practice semi-quavers as well as triplets. And just to add to the party, I'll give you a few more patterns for the semi-quavers on the G minor chord just to make it a bit more interesting. Maybe if you're not so much of a beginner, if you've been playing the piano for a while, this could help. So next pattern would be something like this. Now you could do GBDB, GBDB or a pitch contrast with your pinky finger. GBDB, GBDB, GBDB, just the high note. Stuff like this. So you can modify by choosing your thumb for the root and then adding the octave at the top. So in conclusion, I'm going to talk about the importance of the metronome and how you need to use it alongside you for all of your practice routines or work on the piano and as a musician in general. First of all, the metronome tells you how good are you actually as a player. It's a great reality check because you don't need to rely on other people telling you whether you're playing well or not. Unless of course the other person telling you is a teacher or something. So a great way for you only to know if you are a good player is are you able to play with the metronome not just for a bar or two for the whole song or for the whole section. It will be tough initially but if you can play with the metronome then the control of the song is in your hands. If you've practiced hard enough you're going to execute it. If you've not practiced hard enough if you're like 90% there you're not going to execute it that much because we have to also keep in mind stage fear, pressure of performing in front of other people recording studios. These are not easy environments. You're not going to be playing the piano just in your bedroom so to speak. So in all these other rather hostile environments the pressure grows. So keep the basics right. Can you play on metronome? It's a very important skill. The other importance of the metronome is if you are a studio recording musician or if you want to get into recording or music production this is a very important skill because every track which you layer in a software in a DAW recording software is one after the other. You're probably going to start with the piano. The piano needs to be in time so you have to record that with a metronome. If there's some problem there then you're doomed because the guitar or all the other ingredients will not sit with the piano. Or you do the piano off time you don't know it's off time then you record the next thing on time then you realize oh man the piano was wrong. So these are some of the problems you're going to face. Also as a recording artist you need to understand even if you play a simple chord progression just four chords you may have played this on stage before you may have played it at home you may have played it a bunch of times if you've not played it with a metronome and recorded it you're never going to know how good you sound and you'll realize that even the simplest chord progression is not going to be that easy. Anyway, the practicing with the metronome also allows you and gives you the confidence to focus on the music the irony here is yes we practice with it but eventually it just becomes a part of us so we are the metronome we kind of subconsciously become the metronome and yeah it's very important to get confident with your song that way not relying on the metronome or another musician or the drummer and then I think the metronome itself is an inspiring tool I would love to talk more about it but there's a video in the description on all the techniques of how you can use the metronome to actually set it up well using the app and use it to benefit improvisation and composition so check out the video in the description so it's an inspiring tool and last but not least I would like to add that when you play music with the metronome especially when you do random stuff like fast pentatonic licks you know you don't actually know what you're playing but if you have to play that on a metronome you know exactly where every beat is aligned and you know if you're actually playing right or wrong so you really understand what you're playing so these are the reasons I would recommend you to practice with the metronome and the importance of the metronome and just to conclude what we've done so far is we started by setting up the metronome on an app I'm using this app called pro metronome then we looked at taking a simple beat structure and counting it and getting the body to vibe organically with the pulse and then we took a simple G major and G minor chord looked at different beat subdivisions and tried to play an arpeggio pattern and then we looked at the challenges if any and the challenges can be overcome by looking at all the contrasting properties of sound and music in general which are volume the duration of the notes and the pitch so by adjusting that you create a nice looping cycle within the brain and the body loves cycles so that's what you're trying to do and you stay on time and you help yourself stay better on time and follow the click better so hope you found this lesson useful hope you can apply it in your music do let us know what you thought about the lesson in the comments also if you'd like to learn something else do feel free to write and don't forget to subscribe to our channel and turn on the bell icon for notifications if you haven't already cheers, catch you in the next one