Practice trainer
The oldest practice rule there is: start slow, play it clean, earn the next few BPM. This metronome does the stepping for you — set how often and how much it speeds up, and your target, then just play.
Press Start, or hit the space bar.
Tap the button (or press T) in time with music to measure its tempo. Settings are saved in this browser only.
How to set it up
Start tempo is the big number: choose a speed where the passage is already comfortable — no mistakes, no tension. If you are not sure, it is slower than you think.
Every N bars is how long you stay at each step. Four bars is a good default for a short passage; use eight for a whole section, so each tempo gets a real chance to settle.
Add X BPM is the step size. Five is brisk; two or three is kinder and, over a twenty-minute session, gets you just as far with fewer crashes.
Target is the performance tempo — the marking on the score, or a little above it if you want headroom. When the trainer reaches the target it stays there; the stepping stops on its own.
Why stepping works better than jumping
Most rushing is not a speed problem, it is an unevenness problem: two or three hard notes get compressed every time the tempo rises. A jump of 20 BPM hides those spots inside general chaos, so you practise the chaos. A step of 3 BPM exposes them while everything else still works — you hear exactly which transition fails first, fix it at the slow tempo, and the next step holds. The trainer's job is simply to remove the fiddling: no stopping to nudge a dial every few bars, no forgetting where you were, and a tempo history that lives in the bar counter on screen.
One discipline matters more than the settings: if a step falls apart twice, it was not earned. Stop, drop back two steps, and climb again. The trainer will happily push you into a wall; only you know whether the last bars were clean.
A sample twenty-minute session
| Minutes | Settings | What you are doing |
|---|---|---|
| 0–5 | Start 60% of target, subdivisions on | Learn the notes with the click split into eighths, so nothing hides. |
| 5–15 | +3 BPM every 4 bars, subdivisions off | Climb. Fix the first transition that breaks, at the slow tempo, then resume. |
| 15–18 | Target tempo, steady | Three full runs at tempo. Count how many are clean. |
| 18–20 | Target +5 BPM | One overshoot run. Tomorrow, target will feel slower than it is. |
More practice method — subdividing, accents, and playing against silence — is in how to practise with a metronome. For a plain metronome without the stepping, use the main metronome; both share the same drift-free audio scheduling.