Metronomes / Patience

I have this little Boss DB-30 metronome that I’m in love with. It’s the little things, you know, that hold my practice together. This particular model is small, portable, and has a pulse that gently cuts through whatever I’m playing.

I’ve been thinking recently how much I’ve learned from metronomes. I never used to practice with one, mostly because I associated them with a type of rigid discipline I always tried to run away from, but at some point I had the realization that metronomes don’t just force you to be precise, they also carve out a region of time in which songs can take root. My mind relaxes into the circular pattern of a beat, and all of a sudden the songs I thought had already been written on paper become truly written in real time.

There’s a passage in the Bhagavad Gita where the god Krishna tells Arjuna, a human being, that humans can never really lay claim to the fruits of their actions, only to actions themselves as they are being performed. That truth (or at least, it seems true to me) is why patience is possibly the greatest virtue. To be able to hold on to our actions and love them without being sure exactly where they are headed is a good definition of patience. It’s a great and noble thing.

Whenever I write a song I’m always doing battle with a part of my mind that is worried about where the song is going. Will it be what I wanted it to be? Will it be what you, my dear, potential listener, wanted it to be? This is the part of my mind that closes doors before I can see what lies on the other side of them. And to defeat it requires love in the moment, loving the moment, the moment when whatever I am creating is being born. When all I have to hang on to is the blank space of a beat.

So it’s a little thing, my metronome, but I hold it high regard. For it teaches me the rhythm of my art as well as the art of rhythm.

Tam Lin is a NYC-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose music has been compared to that of Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, and David Byrne. You can hear him at http://www.tamlinmusic.com and http://www.myspace.com/tamlinmusic