How to Track Piano Tempo Progress Over Time

A piece of piano repertoire doesn't have one tempo problem — it has several, hiding in different bars. Hands separate versus hands together is usually the first split that matters.

Hands separate and hands together are different fragments

The left hand alone might have a clean max of 100 BPM on a passage while the right hand alone sits at 88. Combined, they might only hold together at 80. Log all three as separate entries. Averaging them into one number hides which hand is actually the bottleneck — and that's the hand you need to drill.

Track sections, not pieces

"Practising the sonata" isn't a fragment — it's a whole piece with a dozen different tempo ceilings inside it. Break it into the sections that actually resist you: the development's left-hand runs, the recap's octave jumps, the coda's stretch. Log a clean max BPM for each section separately, and don't waste entries on the parts you already play at tempo.

Passage work compounds

A four-bar passage logged weekly for a month tells you far more than a whole-piece runthrough logged once. Runthroughs are for checking the seams are holding. Passage work, logged and tracked, is where the actual gains happen.

Practice tempo is 70–80% of performance tempo

If a passage needs to land at 120 BPM in performance, your solid practice ceiling for drilling it should sit around 84–96 BPM — fast enough to feel the real hand shapes, slow enough to stay clean. Pushing straight to performance tempo before that range is locked in just trains the mistakes at full speed.

The metronome marking isn't your practice tempo

A score's tempo marking tells you the destination, not the route. Treat it as the number your logged sections should be climbing toward over weeks, not the number you sit down and attempt on day one. The gap between where you log today and where the marking sits is exactly the work still ahead of you.

Crank. isn't guitar-only — track piano fragments hands-separate or together, set a target BPM per section, and watch the chart instead of guessing. Free on the App Store for iPhone.