I got The Virtuso Hanon book, my question is..how do I use a metronome? in the first exercise it suggests 60 beats to start and eventually get to 120 beats. the time of the piece is 2/4, how do I know how many notes I play per click? and is 120 beats really fast?
Since the piece is in 2/4 time, the metronome marking would be that the quarter note is equal to 60 bpm. So, just put 60 for the beat, and every measure gets 2 clicks, one click per quater note.
I bet ur exercise has sixteenth notes instead of quater notes though. So, every click will equal 4 sixteenth notes.
Anytime your unclear as to how many clicks for one measure, just look at your time signature. The top number tells u how many beats per measure, and the bottom number tells u what type of note gets one beat or one click.
120 is extremely fast if you're playing all sixteenth notes. However, the more beats a note gets, the slower it is. So, the difficulty of each tempo is relative to the time signature and type of notes being played.