Topic by jcalais

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  • jcalais
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Topic: About the metronome, questions and wishes

So, the staple of my practice, both piano and organ is to use a metronome to not rush over the parts I know well and to keep myself accountable. Progress is also easy, since I just play a section and raise the metronome tempo if I did it without mistakes. I do this until I reach 90% of desired speed and then I move to interpretation.

I have this midi controller, Faderfox EC4 that has a 4x5 matrix of push buttons OR knobs (they can be either) and 8 x 8 sections of these, so a total of around 600 different buttons that I can program. So my group 1, page 1 is configured as the 10 Organteq presets. I was also able to make one midi button toggle the metronome and another to increase and a third to decrease metronome speed.

Here’s the question / suggestion: I would imagine, although I might be wrong, that there is rarely a reason to increase metronome just by one. I typically increase my practice metronome in increments of 10, so I go 60 -> 70 -> 80 etc.

My question: I found the midi mappable command to increase/decrease metronome tempo (by one), but is there a midi command for setting midi tempo with a midi knob? So just set midi tempo to 0 - 127 (x2, since 127 is not enough max tempo).

My suggestion: Make the faster/slower metronome increment user configurable (unless it already is), so that I could increase / decrease by 10 with the push of a button.

Also interested to hear your solutions for this? I hope I’m not the only one practicing with a metronome, because that would either mean that all of you are doing it wrong or that I am doing it wrong I happen to believe firmly in the power of the metronome for practice and I even enjoy practicing with it, so I hope I’m right about the usefulness and that it doesn’t teach any bad manners, like robotic playing.

Reply by tmyoung

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  • tmyoung
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Re: About the metronome, questions and wishes

I would rather see an added option/parameter that would increase/decrease the metronome by a significant amount, rather than replace or modify the current parameter, as that would allow both fast and fine adjustments using different MIDI CC signals.

It would also be a possible additional option for the metronome to be set a specific midi value, though for tempi above 127/128 that could be a problem.  One theoretical workaround for that would be making the click division a selectable power of 2 (eighth/quaver, quarter, half/minim, etc.) would solve that handily as that would allow nearly any tempo click imaginable, but it might add unwanted programmatic overhead.  That said, I don't know exactly what method/formula the metronome uses (though it seems to be something of a MIDI beat clock implementation--as opposed to MIDI Timecode--as it's so closely tied to the midi playback engine, which implies that the timecode is always evaluated in quarter notes which is related to how PPQN works across Microseconds of CPU/global clock time meaning that it is limited--at least in its current form--to BPM being a unit of quarter notes like nearly anything else in the General MIDI standard).

While I personally have never been a metronome user or advocate at all, I certainly see a lot of merit in the suggestion (and for judicious use of the metronome in some settings which vary from player to player as to what an individual actually needs or is helped by).

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