Counting out loud... now I get it!

I have to admit it.  I've never been a big fan of counting out loud.  Probably because my brain goes into a tailspin if I have to think of more than one thing at once.  In any case, I don't usually have much of a problem figuring out rhythms - I can work out the distances between notes without engaging my language centers and that works for my recalcitrant brain.

However recently I hit a road block.  In a renaissance piece I was learning, whatever I did, I could not keep the tempo even.  Inevitably I'd get to one or 2 phrases where I'd speed up. (I'm not the only one - seems to be a common problem with people posting this piece on youtube.)  Even if I was concentrating solely on the tempo, my fingers would run away with me.  The only way I could keep it in check was to have the metronome running, but obviously that wasn't a long term solution.  So my guitar teacher suggested I try counting the tempo out loud...  I'm pretty sure he didn't know I had been avoiding this and therefore suggested it for just that reason, but I have my suspicions...

Anyway, before I concentrated on the tempo problem, the first task was just to keep playing while counting.  As I mentioned before, my brain doesn't like doing 2 things at once and while I'm trying to remember to count to 4 (with 'ands' thrown in for good measure) I'm forgetting to play the notes.  Or counting up to 6.  Or forgetting the 'ands'.    However I persevered and it actually didn't take that long (though I do still sometimes end up with interestingly long measures).   So next to apply it to the problem areas.  There were actually 2 areas where the tempo was running amok- the first was just a run of fast notes. This responded gratifyingly quickly to counting the notes out loud (even if I did end up counting it as 1and2and3and4and5and6 in a 4/4 piece) - I even confirmed success by checking a recording with the metronome and followed it up with just counting in my head to be sure it still worked.   The second problem section had 2 voices where the emphasis wasn't on the 1st and 3rd beats of the measure.   That one was a much tougher nut to crack.  I ended up playing one note at a time and learning which number went with which voice even to count correctly while playing.   Tedious.   But when I got the count right the tempo was spot on.  At this point it's still a challenge for me to count that part and I have to practice the count before running the piece.  Hopefully the correct tempo will eventually get fixed in my brain without me having to count though ...  

So although I still won't be counting out loud to get rhythms unless they are particularly tricky,  I can see this will be an interesting tool to control tempo - yet another weird trick I would never have thought of on my own.