music: how to get your groove on.

Kid1 plays cello and has to videotape herself playing it to a metronome for school.  It's a trial all around.

Metronomes are Satan. Here's why:

• The relentless ticking sends me straight back to fifth grade, with Mrs. Schnierow standing behind me hammering a divot into my right shoulder with her bony claw, saying "ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four" while I struggled through my sonatina (God! those red, red lips and her turtlenecks that smelled like cigarette butts); and...
• No metronome has ever been helpful to me in any way.  Or even polite.

How happy I am, then, to discover this great post by musician Adam Rafferty, a strong anti-metronome advocate.  He writes that dancing is a superior tool for developing body rhythm. 

Plus, his effortlessly funky fingerstyle acoustic version of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" is just the thing to listen to right about now.
 

http://adamrafferty.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/dont-use-a-metronome/