What’s more important, playing the right notes or playing with the right timing? Every professional musician will tell you it’s the timing.

When you dance or march, you feel the flow and beat of the music that supports you as you move. Music has a pulse, just as your heart does. The cycle of expansion and contraction that moves blood through your body is mirrored in the measures of a musical composition. The intake and exhalation of air through your lungs is reimagined in the meter and phrasing of poetry and song.

When the guitarist misses a note, someone might notice. When the drummer misses a beat, everyone on the dance floor stumbles.

Most of us can sing with steady timing and don’t need to think much about it. But when we sit down at the piano or take an instrument in our hands, the technical demands of playing can wreak havoc with our sense of time, especially when learning new music from the page. In a rush to master new material, we focus almost all of our attention on the pitches without taking time to first read through the rhythms and flow of the music.

Even when we are able to clap or vocalize the rhythms of new music on the page, we can find ourselves stumbling in fits and starts when playing the same passages. This problem is compounded for pianists who need to learn one set of rhythms in the left hand and another in the right. Not to mention drummers, who need to coordinate their feet as well as their hands!

That’s when you need to bring in the help of a good friend. Your metronome.

The metronome is the brainchild of inventor Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel, who discovered in 1814 that a pendulum could be weighted on both sides of its pivot and produce an audible beat, making it an ideal practice tool for musicians aiming to practice against a perfectly steady pulse whose speed could be adjusted in small increments.

The original metronome was a mechanical device and is widely available, though digital metronomes and smartphone apps have largely supplanted the old standby.

Whatever device you use, here are some tips about making friends with your metronome:

• Start at a very slow tempo, no more than 40 or 50 beats per minute, and choose a very limited amount of musical material to practice. Just one or two measures will be enough at first.
• Count aloud with your metronome in the time signature of your piece before you start playing. For example, if you are playing a piece in 4/4 time, count at least four beats (one measure) along with the metronome before you start to play. Be certain that you are counting at the same speed as your metronome, even if you need to count two or three full measures before you play.
• Restart when you are out of sync. When you find yourself playing ahead of or behind the metronome’s beat, stop immediately. Then count a measure out aloud again before playing.
• Always start counting on the first beat of a full measure (“downbeat”), even if you are learning a piece that starts on a different beat or the “and” of a beat.
• When you want to speed up your tempo, advance the metronome by no more than five clicks. If you find the new tempo is too fast to play accurately, go back to your original setting and add just one click. Try again. When you’re comfortable at the new tempo, try advancing by five clicks again. Repeat going forward and back as necessary.
• Alternate practicing with and without the metronome. You’re trying to become more consistent, not turn into a machine!

Ask your teacher for more advice about becoming friends with your metronome.