The question is, how do I determine how many beats per minute a song is so I can set the metronome and stay “on the beat”, not rushing or dragging?
If you’re reading off of sheet music, there may be a metronome mark at the beginning, which may look like (quarter note) = 120 or something like that. Set it to that, and that’s how fast it should go. Likewise, there may be a word or two at the beginning of the piece saying what the speed should be: fast, andante, lively, largo… your metronome may have these terms, with a range of tempi, printed on it.
If you’re trying to play along with a song that’s recorded, then you’re first of all dependent on the performers staying on the beat. Try and feel what that beat is, turn the metronome on, and speed it up or slow it down until it seems to match what you’re hearing.
Does your sheet musing have a metronome timing at the top?
E.g. ♪ = 60 or MM =90
?
If none of those ideas work, some metronomes have a “tap” feature, where you can tap along with the recording and it will tell you what the bpm (beats per minute) is.
After the first two beats, don’t.
Also remember that the metronome markings in sheet music are often more suggestions than anything else. Performers have been known to wildly change the marked tempo (see Glen Gould, for instance), and many classical pieces–especially in the Romantic period–call for extensive rubato which is stretching and contracting the tempo in an expressive manner to the performer’s liking.
That said, it is very good to practice with a metronome. Just be aware that the numbers aren’t usually set in stone.
If you want to get the approximate tempo of a recorded song, if you metronome doesn’t have a beat tapping function, you can try a website such as this one.
This is misleading, and technically incorrect.
Rubato–“robbed”–means time taken from (robbed) from some prevailing tempo.
That performers and certain genres may have all sorts of tempi in a performance of a movement ostensibly with one stated or chosen tempo is not a matter of rubato.
But the post makes sense overall.
That’s the classical definition of it, but listening to modern performers play in rubato, you can clearly hear that it’s not a matter of borrowing time from one measure and adding it to the next. There are serious swings in tempo that don’t necessarily get made up.
And if you want to get into a theoretical discussion about what is and isn’t rubato, that’s cool. But read Paderewski’s essay on it, which is very much in line with my use of the term.
ETA: Although now I’m wondering if you just misunderstood my original post about rubato. When I’m talking about stretching or contracting tempos in a piece, I mean in the context of a musical phrase, a couple measures or so at the most, more like within a single measure. I’m not talking about wild swings from section to section or anything like that.
I want to stay in time on my own songs from start to finish for demo purposes. I have a cheap metronome that doesn’t have a tap feature.
Why not make your best guess, set the metronome going, play/sing along with the metronome for a little bit, decide if you’re going too fast or too slow, and re-set the metronome and try again?
It might take a bunch of tries the first time, but you’ll get better at it fairly quickly.
Exactly. Pick a tempo. Play to it. How does it feel? Too slow? Speed it up. Too fast? Slow it down. It’s your own song, so there is no “correct” tempo: it’s up to you to find the feel you want. And if it’s your own song, you should be able to figure out within a few bars whether you’ve set it too fast or too slow.