I super-duper love my metronome. My metronome is one of the oldest musical friends I have, at least in this leg of my musical journey. I have had it since 8th grade and I’m pretty sure I prepared for one of my first All-state auditions with it. Its been with me since day one. Its also been paramount to my musical success as a percussionist and often its easy to forget the role that metronomes in general have taken as a part of my musical growth.
My metronome and the most popular other metronomes on the market today are a part of a line of metronomes called Doctor Beat that are made by Boss. Now the smallest member of this lineup is the DB-30 which is the cutest little clip on thing you’ve ever seen and it was actually the metronome I had before I bought my current one. Then there’s also the celebrity DB-90 which looks like this:
The DB-90 is best known for single-handedly keeping every single drumcorp or marching band in the country in time. The mere sound of it has been known to trigger traumatic episodes among former band members, causing them to relive the sights and sounds of getting screamed at by their psychotic band director whilst simultaneously getting roasted by the sun. Its clunky silver plastic casing weighs at least a couple of pounds and it quite literally eats 9 volt batteries. It comes with enough weird, useless grungy beat presets to run an underground Polish nightclub along with probably the most disturbing synthetic counting voice samples in existence that have never once helped anyone play in time better ever. And the worst part, at over $150 on most sites, the DB-90 is probably the stupidest piece of technology available. Yet in spite of the the supreme extra-ness of the DB-90, metronomes have come a long way through history to earn the prominence they enjoy in today’s musical culture.
The history of metronomes is actually not all that fascinating. It pretty much starts out in the same place as clocks, where Galileo observed and the described the properties of a pendulum. As time and discoveries progressed pendulums were able to be made with adjustable weights which affected how fast the period of the swing was. In 1814, a man by the name of Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel invented the metronome while studying pendulums. His design was the first truly successful metronome because it made sound and had a spring acting as as escapement that kept it ticking. Winkel was not successful at patenting his “chronometer” although, and in 1816 another fellow named Johann Maelzel took Winkels design, slapped a scale on it designating certain bpm’s, and called it his own.
This type of metronome is the one we have all come to know and love as the “classic” metronome. With the advent of mass-produced electrical appliances in the 20th century, metronomes like the Franz electric metronome began gaining ground. Nowadays most metronomes are digital, but Maelzel’s classic style metronomes still appear and are even written for in pieces like Casey Cangelosi’s “Slight of And Evil Hand.” Their effect on the way we write, perform and interpret our music today is immense.
My personal metronome in particular has a special place in my heart, unlike the teeny DB-30 and the utterly awful DB-90, I have a DB-60 which is juuuust right. It has all of the basic functions that you actually need in a metronome plus a few other actually useful extra ones. Best of all its extremely durable, I’ve dropped it on hard floors all the time, and I’ve changed the batteries less than ten times in the 6+ years I’ve owned it. I recently misplaced it for a few weeks over the summer and I was pretty surprised by how upset I was, I mean this little guy has been with me this whole time and even though its just a metronome, I really appreciate all it can do for me everyday. Its amazing how much I end up using it and its so easy to take something simple like that for granted every day, so even though my heart doesn’t skip a beat every time I see it, this metronome definitely clicks for me ;D
This is an interesting post, Gordon! I love your comical but informative tone and the way you weave your personal experiences into your descriptions of the Doctor Beat metronomes. Although it makes sense, I hadn’t realized that clocks and metronomes were invented around the same time. Were the first metronomes made in the early 19th century applied to music immediately? Or did it take some time for musicians to begin using them in their practice sessions?
I would loved for you to have described in more detail about how you use metronomes when you practice! As someone who has never owner a Doctor Beat model metronome it would be interesting for me to hear about how you use all (or some) of the crazy features to your advantage. This might give your reader more insight into the effect metronomes have had on how musicians practice and in turn, how metronomes have effected music. Great job!