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.
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