Building speed
Why five BPM works
Three clean passes earns 5 BPM; a failure costs 5 and the passes must be earned again. The rule's power lies in how small each increment is.
Going from 80 to 120 in one move means learning a different motion — a different finger path, different timing of effort. Eight steps of five is the same motion getting slightly faster each time, with nothing to relearn.
Twenty to twenty-five BPM is a realistic ceiling for one session. Beyond that you almost certainly paid for it in accuracy, and tomorrow the speed will not still be there.
Three ways through a plateau
If a tempo has refused to move for several days, more of the same will not shift it. Change the approach instead.
First, change the rhythm. Play a sixteenth-note passage as dotted rhythms, long-short and then short-long. Each note gets prepared from a different position, which exposes the specific finger combination that is weak.
Second, cut the passage smaller. Break eight notes into four pairs and repeat each pair above the target tempo. Short fragments can be played fast, and reassembling them brings the whole passage up.
Third, take a day off. Motor learning consolidates during sleep, and a tempo that refused to happen yesterday is often unremarkable the next day.
At the limit, the problem is tension
What breaks near your ceiling is usually not finger speed but effort. The intention to play fast shows up as tension in the shoulder and forearm, and a tense muscle moves more slowly, not less.
Drop 20 BPM and play the same pattern while checking your shoulder, forearm and wrist in turn. Coming back up from a relaxed state frequently takes you straight past the old limit.
Frequency also beats duration. Three sessions of twenty minutes almost always outperform one of an hour. Repetition while fatigued is inaccurate repetition, and inaccurate repetition subtracts.
Read next
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Practising with subdivisions
If the space between beats is empty, nothing that happens in there is being checked.
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BPM by genre
The number is only a starting point, but a starting point saves a great deal of time.
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Reading time signatures
The top number says how many, the bottom says of what. Most confusion dissolves right there.
Read the guide