How to practice piano with a metronome (without playing like a machine)

Players tend to have one of two relationships with the metronome. Some never use it, because "music isn't mechanical" and the click makes them tense. Others use it constantly and cannot play a phrase without it, which is its own kind of problem. Both have misunderstood what the thing is for.

A metronome does one job: it tells you the truth about your rhythm. Your ears, while you play, cannot. The part of your attention that hears is busy with the part that plays, and every pianist alive believes their rhythm is steadier than it is. The click is an outside witness. Used well, it makes you less mechanical, because it shows you exactly where your internal pulse is unreliable so you can fix it and then take the click away.

Setting the tempo: lower than you think

The most common metronome mistake is setting it to the tempo you want to play at. That is the destination, not the starting point.

Set the click at a tempo where you can play the passage three times in a row with no wrong notes, no hesitations and no tension you notice. For a hard passage that is often half the final tempo, sometimes less. The number will feel insulting. It is not; it is information about where the passage actually is today, and a tempo that is honest today is a tempo you can raise tomorrow.

From there, raise it in small steps: four or five beats per minute at a time, never more, and only after three clean repetitions at the current step. If a step fails twice, go back two steps. This climb is slow on any single day and startlingly fast over three weeks. Chopinly's metronome can stamp the tempo onto the piece you are practising each time you step up, so the goal's page draws the climb as a line — the most motivating chart in the app, because it only ever goes one way if you follow the rule.

Let the click count for you, then stop letting it

At the start, the click is on every beat and you are matching it. That is fine for a week. It is not fine forever, because a player who can only keep time with a click on every beat has outsourced their pulse. So thin it out.

• Click on two and four. In four-four, mute beats one and three. Your body now has to supply the downbeat, and the click on the weak beats catches you rushing into it. Jazz players have done this for a century; it is just as useful for a Mozart sonata.
• Click on one only. The whole bar is yours. If you drift, you meet the next click early or late and you know by how much.
• Click every other bar. Mute all the beats of alternate bars. You will be surprised how far you wander in one bar of silence — and how quickly that stops once you are listening for it.
• Click on the off-beat. Set the metronome so the click lands on the "and". This is the hardest and the most revealing. Passages you thought were solid dissolve for a day and then come back steadier than before.

Chopinly's metronome lets you mark any beat of the bar as accented, normal or muted, so all of these are a tap or two away.

Subdivisions: switch them on, then off

When sixteenths are uneven — and they are, in every fast passage, until you fix them — put the metronome on the sixteenth subdivision so every note has its own click. Play with it until every note lands. Then drop to eighths, then to the beat, and check that the evenness survived. It usually does not, entirely, the first time; the subdivision was doing some of your listening for you. Go back and forth until it does.

Triplets against a duple click, or duplets against a triple one, are the same idea: set the subdivision that matches the hard rhythm, get it clean, then remove the scaffolding.

Where to put the click in the phrase

A metronome is a grid, and music is not on a grid — it breathes. So the objection goes. The answer is that the breathing has to be chosen, and you cannot choose what you cannot measure. Practise the passage strictly on the click until it is honest, then take the click away and add rubato on purpose. The rubato you add deliberately to a steady foundation sounds like music. The rubato that was there because you could not play the passage in time sounds like a mistake, and every listener hears the difference even if they cannot name it.

One useful drill for expressive passages: play the phrase on the click, then off the click with your own timing, then on the click again. If the third version feels constrained, your rubato in the second was larger than you thought; decide whether you meant it.

Tempo markings are not numbers

Scores say Andante and Allegro, not 76 and 132. The mappings that metronomes print are conventions, and they are wide. Chopinly shows the marking that corresponds to the current number so you can set "around andante" without a reference table, but the marking is a character, not a speed. An andante in a Schubert song and an andante in a Beethoven slow movement are different worlds. Pick the number that makes the phrase speak, then practise at that number.

Keep the click going when the screen sleeps

A practical note, because it matters more than it should. Most metronome apps and websites go silent, or stumble, the moment the phone's screen locks — the browser throttles the timer that schedules the clicks. Chopinly renders a whole bar into an audio buffer and loops it on the audio thread, so the click keeps going behind a locked screen and the lock-screen controls can pause it. Put the phone face down on the piano and practise; the battery will thank you.

When to switch it off

The click is a tool for finding out where your time is unreliable. Once a passage is steady with the click on two and four, with the off-beat click, and with a bar of silence, it is steady — and then the click has done its job. Play it without. Record it, listen back with the click running silently in your head, and see whether you still agree with yourself. If you do, you have a pulse. If you don't, you know which bar to go back to.

A player who uses the metronome this way does not play like a machine. They play like someone who knows exactly where the beat is and has decided, on purpose, how far to lean away from it.

A metronome routine you can start today

1. Pick a passage that is not clean. Find the tempo where it is — three in a row.
2. Stamp that tempo on the piece in the log. Raise by four. Repeat.
3. When the target tempo is close, put the click on two and four. Then on the off-beat.
4. Take the click away. Record. Listen.
5. Write down the tempo you finished at. Tomorrow starts there, minus a few.