by Serguey Shinder
I learned to play with a metronome, and for years I treated it as a moral instrument as much as a musical one. Playing to the click was discipline. Drifting from it was sloppiness. I practiced everything locked to that steady pulse, and I got good at staying with it, so good that I started to believe the pulse and the music were the same thing. Keep perfect time, I thought, and you have played the part well.
For a long time this served me. Timing is real, and a player who cannot hold a tempo is a burden to everyone around them. But somewhere the tool stopped teaching me and started limiting me. My playing was accurate and lifeless. Every note landed exactly where the grid said it should, and the result was correct in a way that nobody actually enjoyed listening to, including me. I had confused being on time with being alive.
The thing I had been sanding away, without knowing it, was the tiny human variation that makes music feel like it is being played by a person rather than printed by a machine. The slight push into an exciting phrase, the barely-late note that makes a moment breathe, the microscopic rush and drag that a listener feels without ever being able to name. All of that lives in the small distances from the grid, and I had spent years training myself to eliminate exactly those distances in the name of discipline.
Turning the metronome off was frightening in a way that sounds absurd when I say it out loud. Without the click I felt like I might fall, like the time would collapse. And for a while it did wobble. But underneath the wobble I could suddenly hear something I had been drowning out, which was my own internal sense of where the beat wanted to go, a sense that had been there the whole time, overruled by the machine.
What I understand now is that the metronome was scaffolding, and I had mistaken it for the building. It exists to build an internal clock, and once that clock is built, staying externally tethered to the click stops strengthening it and starts replacing it. I had outsourced my sense of time to a device so completely that I no longer trusted the one I had grown, which was the whole point of the exercise in the first place.
I still practice with it sometimes, to check myself, the way you might step on a scale. But I play without it now, and the playing has a pulse that is mine, imperfect and slightly alive, moving a hair ahead when the music leans forward and settling back when it rests. The click gave me time. Turning it off gave the time back to me, and only then did it start to sound like something worth listening to.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Leave a Reply