I have found something interesting and would like to share it. Sure it is not a big discovery and all advanced and experimented players know this. But it could be useful for beginners and a little more advanced students.

It is just my personal experience so that I am not saying it should work for everybody and for any piece. But it is working for me:

The usual way I had for learning a new piece has been to first learn the notes, practice until I can play all decently well (no too many errors, reasonable tone quality) and then fine adjust the timing and tempo with the metronome.

The result is that I have been considering this gadget as a tyrant that adds additional stress for me as player and I avoided its use every time I could escape it.

Now I am working on the first Allegro of Bach Sonata 1034 in Em. It is a difficult piece for my level but I am confident I will be able to play it in a few days (or should I say weeks?).

It is 70 measures of mostly 1/16s and lots of chromatic changes, that make the beauty of this fine piece.

I did not advance as fast as I wanted and had the idea of turning on the metronome at this early stage of learning.

To my surprise, I found it much, much easier to learn the piece with the help of the clicking machine than without it. I can work and repeat those passages I still find difficult in a loop, until I get them OK.

The trick is to find the tempo one can play most of the piece without much stress and then work and rework just the parts with difficulty.

I am not very good and for now I have to play it at 1/8 = 90. It will be some time until I can increase the tempo to something acceptable. But I feel I am now on the right way.

So, my metronome has lost its ugly, tyrannical face and has become more a friend than an enemy.

If someone is in a similar situation, give it a try.

Practicing with metronome really helps me too! I usually tend to speed up/slow down quite a lot, so it sure helps. Also, playing with a tunner on helps me too. Nice to get a piece in tune and in time =].

I have mixed feelings about the tuner.

My Korg can activate both functions simultaneously and I sometimes use it for initial tuning and when in doubt. But then, when I have to play (and we do a lot of duets with my teacher) the tuner is not (cannot) be there and I have to tune by ear for each note as we play along.

So I believe it is better not to get used to adjusting to the tuner too often.

In a way, the same applies to the tempo. My teacher will hold the tempo very accurately without needing a metronome. i.e., she can mark the tempo with a foot in quarters, while we are playing in 1/16s, something impossible for me for the time being. And normally I can follow her tempo changes she may do for stylistic reasons or whatever.

But for the initial learning of the piece, the metronome seems to be very important, at least for these Baroque Allegri that have strong and repetitive rhythm (sorry I cannot express it better, my English is failing a little this morning).

Jose Luis,
I use a tuner and metronome combination here as well. For the most part a metronome is good as you have described. Start slow and work the speed up. There is a tendency for players to speed up on fast bits and slow down on the bigger note values. It tends to iron out the tempo imperfections and it helps to stress a certain amount of evenness in the technique but there are things that it causes that aren't so good musically. I find that it is good for exercises and initial learning of etudes.

As for the tuner. I use it in limited amounts also. I have found ways of using it where I'm not as much playing a visual game with the device as working my ears and preception. of the pitches. For example, working on the ear training. Tuners are pretty good at Octaves so I practice them in this manner. I will tune the lower note of an octave visually as a location point. Once that note is sounding in tune before I glance at the tuner, then I work on the octave interval. Generally, Playing the note before looking at the tuner. Octaves are good intervals for certain tunes in ear training/sight singing such as "Over the Rainbow" from the Wizard of Oz or The Mel Torme "Christmas Song." It is also used in the Christmas song called: "Do You Hear What I hear?" Where the Root/Fifth/Octave/Fifth intervals are used. I will do this on the different tonalities for exercise of emb. and ear training as a singer would. Doing this sort of thing would help with that 1034 2nd Mvt. Allegro where the high F# note is a bit tricky to get properly. I would not recommend playing every note and staring at the device becasue that isn't beneficial.

Thanks. Very good recommendations. And yes, that 3 F# is difficult to get at any rate and to get it in tune is well, something that will come in due time, I hope.

if i could get a metronome that said 1, 2, 3, 4 rather tehn clicked i would get one but i find them hard to follow otherwise(and hate them with a vengence)

Most models I know can stress the first beat, though I do not use the feature. A talking metronome could be funny but not much precise, I'm afraid

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Shouldn't be too much difficult to build one, with bunch of electronics components. Also through PC programming it should be feasible and rather easy, you can try asking some friends. I could do the first option, no the second, but soon my grandchild will....

i am actually building one that uses a light instead of a click for my product desighn course work at school, and once i have built it and it is right (as well has been marked an i have it back) i will ue it

If you really need a talking metronome for some reason, you could improvise one (albeit with fixed tempo and rhythm) by recording in Audacity the counts in loud voice. You can use the click feature of Audacity for your own reference while recording or an external metronome for the same purpose.

Record a short series of counts or just one measure and then use the cut and paste feature to repeat it as much as you need. I think it could also be played as a loop, but I am not sure of the howto. But cutting and pasting should be OK for reasonably long pieces.

If you want to go the technical road, you can build a pulse generator with variable rate very easily using a 555 IC (or countless other options) and use the output pulses not to tick a loudspeaker but to step though an analog recording of the numbers you want to listen, previously recorded on an CMOS audio analog memory (a standard IC some years ago, not sure of the situation now). If you are not much electronically oriented, you will need a helpful friend with enough knowledge of this kind of circuits (that are rather simple, in any case).

Good luck...

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to step though = to step through

i don't realy need one that talk, i'm going to see how my light one at school turns out, if not i will keep using the online one i use sometimes