Practising with the metronome and the tuner
What the tools do is explained above. This is how to work with them — and which mistakes happen most often.
Metronome
In practice: the tempo ladder
A metronome does little good if you simply let it run alongside you. The method that reliably works is the tempo ladder: 60, 66, 72, 80, 88, 96, 104. Start at the tempo where the passage succeeds three times in a row without error — not the one where it “nearly” succeeds. After three clean run-throughs, move up one step. At the first mistake, drop two steps.
Dropping two steps rather than one is where almost everybody wants to cut the corner, and it is the actual mechanism. A mistake at 96 does not originate at 96; it is already present at 88, where it can still be corrected. Drop only one step and you keep practising at the very tempo that produced the error.
Second: never take a whole piece, take the difficult four bars plus one bar either side. Those six bars are the unit of practice. A piece does not get faster by being played end to end often enough, but by its three bottlenecks ceasing to be bottlenecks.
Write down the tempo you reached, with the date. It sounds bureaucratic, but it is the only way to see progress that happens in increments of five over weeks. Without a note you remember the feeling, and the feeling is unreliable.
Taking the click away — the real exercise
Once a passage sits at the target tempo, thin the metronome out rather than switching it off. First stage: in common time set the beat count so it clicks only on one and three. You now carry the pulse between the clicks yourself. Second stage: only on beat one. Third: only on the first beat of every second bar.
This shows incorruptibly whether the tempo is genuinely steady. Arrive at a click two bars away without a jolt and you have internalised the pulse. Arrive consistently early and you are playing faster than you think — by far the most common direction of drift.
A more demanding variant from jazz practice: have the metronome click only on two and four. The click is then no longer the downbeat but the backbeat, and the sense of beat one has to come entirely from you. Two weeks of this and you hear rhythm differently.
In compound metres it pays to set the reference value deliberately. “6/8 at 80” is ambiguous: quavers or dotted crotchets? For learning, set quavers and get six clicks per bar; for playing, set dotted crotchets and get two — and only then does the bar sound like six-eight rather than like six counted quavers.
Common mistakes
The click becomes a crutch. If you can only play a piece with the metronome and wobble immediately without it, you have not practised the pulse but the act of reacting to a signal. Thinning it out, as above, is not an extra but part of the exercise.
The target tempo as the starting tempo. There is a number at the top of the piece and many people begin there. It is the goal after two weeks. A passage played almost-correctly thirty times is harder to fix than one never played wrongly.
Speeding up in a crescendo. Loudness and tempo couple almost automatically in the body: louder becomes faster, quieter becomes slower. The metronome makes this mercilessly audible, which is exactly why loud passages should be practised with the click on.
Playing on after a mistake. The reflex to play through a slip belongs on stage, not in the practice room. In the practice room: stop, isolate the spot, drop the tempo, three clean repetitions, continue.
Working too long in one go. Metronome work is concentration-intensive. After roughly twenty minutes accuracy measurably drops and you begin consolidating errors rather than removing them. Two blocks of twenty minutes beat one of fifty.
Tuner
In practice: a tuning routine that holds
The direction matters more than most people assume. Always approach the target pitch from below, never from above. If you are sharp, wind clearly below the target — about a quarter tone — and come back up. The reason is mechanical: only while tightening does the winding sit firmly on the post. A string brought down to pitch from above creeps within minutes and goes flat again.
Pluck the open string firmly, but without overdriving it, and wait about half a second before reading. Every freshly struck string is briefly sharp at the attack and only settles to its real pitch as it stabilises. Read at the moment of attack and you will tune systematically flat.
On guitar, after all six strings are done, a cross-check is worth it that no tuner can perform: play an open E and an open D chord and listen for beating. Beating is the slow swelling and fading that occurs when two nearly equal frequencies meet. The slower the beat, the closer the two pitches. When it disappears entirely, the interval is pure.
One note on temperature: an instrument brought in from a cold car keeps drifting for ten to twenty minutes as it warms. Tuning is only worth doing once it is at room temperature. The same goes for newly fitted strings, which keep stretching for two or three days.
What a tuner cannot do
A chromatic tuner measures a single frequency and compares it against the equal-tempered grid. What it cannot judge is whether the instrument is in tune with itself. If all six open strings read zero cents and a chord at the fifth fret still sounds wrong, the tuner is not the problem — the intonation is.
The standard check takes two minutes: on each string compare the harmonic over the twelfth fret with the fretted note at the twelfth fret. Both should be the same pitch. If the fretted note is sharp, that string’s saddle needs to move back; if flat, forward. On a classical guitar with a fixed bridge there is nothing to adjust — there a deviation of more than about five cents points to high action or old strings.
The capo problem belongs here too. A capo presses the strings down and thereby adds tension. After fitting one the instrument is nearly always slightly sharp, especially on the thick strings. So: fit the capo first, then tune — not the other way round.
On concert pitch: this tuner works at A4 = 440 Hz and can be set to other values. That is not decoration. Play with an orchestra tuning to 442 Hz, or in historically informed performance at 415 Hz, and the reference has to move — 415 Hz sits almost exactly a semitone below 440.
Common mistakes
Tuning with vibrato. Among string players and singers this is the single most common error. Vibrato typically swings ±20 to ±50 cents; the display averages it and shows a pitch that is not sounding at the moment you read it. For tuning, hold the note straight.
Plucking too hard. A very hard attack pulls the string sideways out of rest and briefly raises the tension. On the thin strings, ten cents of deviation from attack strength alone is easy to reach.
Staring at a single value. The display always trembles a little, because a real string does not behave perfectly periodically. What matters is where the reading settles over half a second, not the value of a single measurement.
Confusing the octave. A chromatic tuner names the note, not the string you wanted. Tune the low E an octave too high and it will happily keep showing “E” — and the string will break. On guitar the open strings are 82.41 / 110.00 / 146.83 / 196.00 / 246.94 / 329.63 Hz; the displayed frequency is the more reliable check than the letter.
Underestimating ambient noise. The tuner hears everything the microphone picks up. Air conditioning, a neighbouring instrument or a conversation in the room can make detection useless. Moving closer to the microphone and finding a quiet room solves nearly every “the tuner shows nonsense” problem.