Metronome
The only person I’ve ever known in real life that owned a metronome was my grandma. She had a little music room just off her giant dining room with a piano, a safe full of… money and gold bars and 100-year-old coins, and a bunch of very interesting instruments. It was always hot in this room since it faced the sun, so the wooden blinds stayed drawn. The sun peeked through them, and I would teach myself how to play piano from 30-year-old music books in the half-light. She had harps, xylophones, many guitars in various states of disrepair, and a piano that she tuned and re-learned how to play every year. There was a metronome on top of that piano that I never quite understood how to use. But it was solid, must’ve been from the 70’s. She’s gone now, along with her music room, and that house probably is, too. It was the last non-condo on the street, and now that she died, and my uncle who took it over did, too, there’s no chance it’s still there. I never went back.
Before it disappeared, I rescued a small set of bells (the ring-y version of the xylophone), and my great-grandmother’s accordion is hopefully waiting for me at my parent’s house for me to claim someday. The metronome probably disappeared in an estate sale. It happens. We don’t need real metronomes anymore, anyway, not with phone apps or DAWs… and now there is also this, a free metronome from Scenic Route for the Playdate.
Since it’s digital, this metronome can do more than just tick. You can change the sound. You can change the time signature. You can even make it count in triplets. You can adjust the BPM by 1 with the D-pad or by 10 beats at a time with the crank. The screen is white with black font on the “1” beat, and black with white font on the others, so it’s clear when the beginning of the measure is.
The sound options: click, snap, cowbell, or beep. Subdivisions are: quarter, eighth, triplets, or sixteenths. Time scale choices: 4/4, 3/4, 2/4, 7/8, 6/2, or 5/2, so you can get real weird math rock with it if you want. Five beats in a measure always feels like you missed a step going down the stairs, but there’s just something about it at the same time. The time signature and subdivisions update on the main screen when you switch back from the menu, so it’s clear what setting you’re using. When you click over to the menu to adjust these settings, there’s a random music fact on half of the screen, like, “A single violin is made from over 70 individual pieces of wood,” or “Japan has the shortest national anthem in the world.” And it gets loud enough that you can hear it over your guitar/piano/whatever you’re playing.
The metronome isn’t a complex machine, but the advances we’ve had in technology let us do so much more now than just keep time. If the Playdate Stereo Dock can ever make it out of whatever development purgatory it’s been living in for years now, there are three things I’d use it for most: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s free-album-on-Playdate “Polygondwanaland,” the Backyard Rain Soundscape by Brian Dorsey, and this Metronome app. I don’t want to use a metronome on my phone, and I don’t have my grandma’s original. I want to keep time with my Playdate as it keeps time with me.
(Released August 16, 2022, on Itch.)