Clare, Metronome, Songsheet 2


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Question by roxas3000: How to use software metronome with sheet music?
I’m new at music. My software metronome gives it in bpm. I have no idea how to use it though, because sometimes the sheet music says stuff like crotchet equals 92 or allegro and I’m just stumped. Any answers or resources on how to figure out how to set the metronome and then play to the beat?

Best answer:

Answer by Noah
Good question.

First, CROTCHET is the British word for what we Americans call the QUARTER NOTE.

Second, when the metronome say “crotchet equals 92″, it is telling you that there are 92 crotchets per minute, or 92 BPM (beats per minute).
This fact is only relevant if you are READING or WRITING music using notation. It is NOT relevant if you just want a beat to play to.

Third, the “Allegro” you mentioned is nothing more than a guide if you need help interpreting the piece of music you are working with. Again, this isn’t relevant if you just want to play with the beat. Just pick a speed that feels comfortable to you, don’t worry what’s it called, and start playing away.

However, if you ARE working with sheet music, then you have to understand a few more things. The Western system of notation tells us 3 things:

1. WHAT to play (note names and how high or low the pitch is)
2. WHEN to play (by assigning different note values, we create an order in which notes are played)
3. HOW to play (this is the wonderful world of DYNAMICS – all the stuff that tells you things like how loud to play, what mood to use, how fast the tempo should be, etc.

It’s important to know these things so that you can separate the information you get into different categories.
When a tempo is given for a piece of music, the author has to decide what notation to use in order to convey the beats.

MOST people nowadays (and for the last 200 years) use the symbol of the QUARTER NOTE to represent the space of one beat when they begin to write out the music. You have to understand that you can use ANY symbol to represent ONE BEAT, it just so happens that the QUARTER NOTE is the most frequently used!!

The mistake here is in thinking that QUARTER NOTES somehow have an objective value outside the context of a piece – they DON’T. In fact, there are plenty of situations where HALF NOTES and QUARTER NOTES in one piece can move FASTER (during performance) than the 16TH and 8TH NOTES in another piece. The difference depends on the TEMPO chosen for the whole work, which brings us to the last point.

TEMPO is sort of the “master” speed for the whole work. Even if it slows down or speeds up somewhere in the middle, the music will eventually return to the TEMPO set at the beginning of the piece. Words like “Allegro”, “Adagio”, “Largo”, etc. are used to describe different TEMPOS for music. Again, there is NO OBJECTIVE meaning to these words. When you see a metronome with these terms, it’s a good bet that the words describe a RANGE of BPM settings (For example, mine says that an Allegro is anything between 120 BPM and 160 BPM). These are put there to help guide someone who may or may not need a suggestion on how to assign a TEMPO to a given piece. They are not meant to become concrete terms that have concrete definitions.

The word “Allegro” simply means “fast” in Italian. AND the meaning of “fast” has changed throughout the history of music. What an ALLEGRO meant to Bach was not necessarily the same thing it meant to Mozart or Beethoven.

I hope this helps you out a little. Trust me, after a while this stuff will be “old hat” and you’ll be on to bigger and better challenges.

Good Luck,

Noah

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