A Traditional Metronome

Although BARBARA is designed to help with mixed meters, it is easy to use it as a 'traditional' metronome. For example, when a single 4/4 bar is defined and the Loop button is pressed, BARBARA will play the 4/4 rhythm.

The easiest way to use BARBARA as a traditional metronome is to use the Quick Start button that is marked with two dots. The following video demonstrates this.

Rests

In addition to the buttons for bars, BARBARA has buttons with rest symbols. It is thus possible to create sequences of bars that contain silence.

The following is a sequence with whole rest.

If the Loop button is pressed when the above simple sequence is programmed into BARBARA, the metronome will play the 4/4 rhythm so that every 4th bar is silent.

The sound would be the following.

Alternative Sounds

BARBARA has buttons with light numbers to make the primary metronome sounds. Then there are buttons with dark numbers which make alternative, or secondary, metronome sounds.

The following sequence plays 4/4 rhythm so that the first bar is played with alternative sound, and the three subsequent bars are played with primary sound.

The above sequence would make the following sound after the Loop button is pressed:

If a musician would like to play four 4/4 bars so that only the first beat of the the first bar is made with alternative sound, then the sequence could be the following.

The improved sequence would make the following sound when repeated.

BARBARA can use 'bars' with numbers like 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16. These 'bars' have one as the upper numeral. They can correspond to notes in music. With these 'bars' it is possible to construct 'artificial' bars with any time signature. The 'bars' with grey background produce the tock sounds, and non-grey 'bars' make tick sounds.

Warm-Up Exercises

Many musicians are accustomed to make their muscles warm before doing actual playing.

For example, if you search YouTube with words like drumming exercises minutes, you will find videos which recommend doing a set of exercises so that each exercise lasts a certain number of minutes.

BARBARA is a very suitable tool to give timing for such warm-up exercises. For example, the following sequence would play the standard metronome sound for 2 minutes, and after that a few bars would be played with a different metronome sound. So the musician would know to move to the following exercise.

If the Loop button is used when the above sequence is visible, the sequence would be repeated until the Stop button is pressed.

In the following video the above sequence is developed further, so that the metronome stops automatically when all 2-minute exercises are completed.

If you watch the above video, you will notice that BARBARA calculates automatically that 70 bars are needed for 2-minute play when the tempo is 140.

Doing short warm-up exercises so that the metronome signals with a different sound when it is time to move to the next exercise can be a relaxing experience. The musician can concentrate to the exercise, without worrying when to stop the current exercise. When the metronome stops automatically after a set of exercises, the musician knows that all that was planned is done.

Mysterious Buttons ?

At the first sight the many buttons in BARBARA may look confusing. There is, however, a certain logic how the buttons are organized.

To clarify the logic of BARBARA buttons, let's first describe the produced sounds with words:

The rule is that in the yellowish buttons/bars the first beat is a tick sound. The tick sound can be followed by zero or more tock sounds, depending on which bar is in question.

The grey buttons produce only tock sounds.

These rules are followed in all bar buttons, in which the lower numeral can be 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32.

Rare Time Signatures

The grey bar buttons can be used, for example, to make a monotonous metronome. Perhaps they are most useful when we want to play rare time signatures for which single buttons do not exist.

By using the two 1/4 buttons, we can create an artificial 4/4 bar, in the following way.

By following this logic, it is possible to make rare time signatures. For example, you can think that the following sequence contains two bars with time signatures 9/4 and 11/4.

They grey buttons can be used in many ways. For example, the following sequences are both valid constructions for a 9/8 bar.

With the grey buttons it is possible to make almost any kind of time signature. If you use the repeat signs, you can repeat the artificial bars that are made with two buttons. For example, the following sequence plays four 7/16 bars which are followed by a single 9/16 bar.