The Metronome

Quick: what's the tempo of a favorite song (pick any song you like) in beats per minute (BPM)?

We all know "fast" from "slow", but that doesn't help much. Plus, it's a law of playing live music that you'll always play faster on stage than you want to--something about adrenaline (and maybe alcohol) speeding up the process.

I bring this up because after many, many months of playing some of our songs, our resident musical genius Chris is challenging us to lock in our tempo--with real numbers. That means using a metronome to practice, and I'm finding it to be damned hard work.

It's easy enough to start a well-known song and match the metronome. But keeping the tempo locked-in...well, that's real work. There's a lot of muscle memory to unlearn. I was just working on "Gloria", which is supposed to be at 130 BPM. I can start at 130, but within a dozen measures, I find myself drifting.

Gotta get back to work. By the way, here's a handy resource where you can look up the BPM of a whole lot of songs.