Piano Tempo Practice: How to Get a Passage Up to Speed

To get a piano passage up to tempo: find the speed where you can play it perfectly and comfortably, stay there until several reps in a row are clean, then move the metronome up 5 BPM. Repeat for weeks. It's unglamorous, it works, and everything else in this article is about doing it without wasting reps.

Start where it's clean, not where it's written

The score says quarter note = 132; your hands don't care. Your real starting tempo is the fastest speed where every note sounds even, the fingering is the final fingering, and your wrists stay loose. For a hard run that might be 60 — far below target. That's fine: a clean 60 is a foundation, and a scrambled 100 is a habit you'll have to unlearn.

Hands separately first — and know why

Hands-together tempo is capped by whichever hand is weaker, and playing together hides which one that is. Run each hand alone against the metronome to find its own clean tempo. If the left is 20 BPM behind, that's where the practice time goes — drilling both hands together just rehearses the right hand waiting.

Isolate the bars that actually cap you

A passage is only as fast as its hardest beat. Instead of looping all sixteen bars, find the two where the tempo actually falls apart — the jump, the crossing, the awkward turn — and treat them as their own fragment with their own tempo. When the hard fragment catches up, the whole passage moves.

Climb in 5 BPM steps

• Several clean, relaxed reps in a row at the current tempo — then up 5 BPM.
• A rep gets uneven or a wrist tightens — back down one step; bank more clean reps.
• Progress is a few durable BPM a week on hard material. Some weeks the tempo consolidates instead of climbing. Both count.

Write the tempo down

The method spans weeks, and memory flattens weeks into "still working on it." A written tempo per fragment — left hand alone, hands together, the two hard bars — turns that into visible motion: 63 to 80 is progress you can see, not just hope for.

Crank. keeps that log for you: each passage is a fragment with a target BPM and a chart of every session's clean tempo. Works for piano exactly as it does for guitar. Free on the App Store for iPhone.