Metronome 120 full#

I’ll listen to a few recordings, and there’s a good chance these recordings will be at different tempos – because Allegro is a loosely-defined term. What I usually do when learning a new piece is listen to several performer examples to get a feel for it at various speeds. This is why, to some extent, choosing a tempo is a judgement call.

Metronome 120 full#

If it’s marked allegro and the entire piece is full of 16 th notes, you’re probably not going to play it the same BPM as an allegro piece comprised of mostly quarter notes. It also depends on the notes involved in the piece. Allegro, for example, could be anywhere from 120-170, depending on your abilities and the piece. There are general ranges for each of these tempos, but you generally have some wiggle room.

These are the speeds you’re most likely to come across, and the ones I teach first:īut how do you know what speeds each of these are, exactly? How slow is slow? How fast is fast? Sometimes words like allegro come with a tempo number sometimes they don’t. Italian tempo markingsįinally, let’s talk briefly about the random Italian words you’ll see in your music. If you want to get technical, that means I’m playing quarter notes at a rate of 240 beats per minute. Each of these ticks is a half note beat, which means you’d play two quarter notes to a beat like this. Here’s an example of that – this time we’re switching it up and changing the tempo to 120. So if you’re playing a bunch of quarter notes, you’ll be able to fit two quarter notes inside of each half beat. This means the metronome should be set to 120 beats, and each of those ticks equals 1 half note. Cut timeįinally, another common tempo is the half note beat in cut time. With each tick of the metronome, I think “1-2-3, 1-2-3,” and count until I feel comfortable with the rhythm. 3 of these quarter notes fit inside each tick, like so.įor this example (and others like it), I like to get a three-count in my head before starting to play. In the example we were just looking at, we have left hand quarter notes. Here’s our 60 BPM metronome ticking away again. Each tick of the metronome represents one dotted half note. That means that, with each tick of the metronome, three quarter beats will pass by. How many beats does a dotted half note receive? We still have our number marking as 60 BPM, but this time we have a dotted half note in front of it. Make sense? Tempo markings in music: Dotted notesĭotted notes present us a different challenge. Here’s the sixteenth note pattern we were just looking at. Our metronome is set to 60 still, but this time, instead of ticking quarter notes, it’s ticking eighth notes. Let’s hop to the keyboard and try it out. Take a look at this left hand sixteenth note pattern – this means we would play two sixteenth notes per tick. When you set the metronome to 60 with this example, 1 eighth note equals 1 tick. This is telling us that there are 60 eighth beats per minute. Here we have the same tempo number – 60 beats per minute – except this time there’s an eighth note in front of the number.

That’s pretty simple so far, right? Where it can get a little confusing is when the note in front of the number isn’t a quarter beat. If I were to play eighth notes along with this quarter note beat, there would be two notes for every tick – like this. So if I were to play quarter notes with this beat, the keys I press would match the ticking, like so. Each of these ticks represents a quarter note beat. The quarter note in front of it is simply saying that there are 60 quarter-note beats per minute in this particular piece. So if a piece is marked “60 BPM”, it means it’s as fast as a clock ticks (60 beats per minute). This number tells you how many beats per minute a piece is. This is really simple – Justin B correctly assumed it’s the metronome number. Let’s start by talking about what the number means. Here in North America, we use the words “quarter note” and “half note”, but in Britain and elsewhere, they use “crotchet” and “minim”. Just to clarify, a crotchet is a quarter note, and a minim is a half note – the words we use for these notes depend on region. If you’ve ever been confused by random Italian in your music like allegro, or aren’t sure what the quarter notes, half notes and so on before the number means, then keep watching! ? It’s a pretty straightforward answer so this won’t be a hugely long video, but it’s an important topic that I’ve yet to discuss on this channel. In today’s video, we’re going to answer a question about tempo markings in music.