How to practice music with tempo changes

Finding the right tool

Practicing a piece of music that has more than one tempo can be challenging. This is especially true if there’s an accelerando or ritardando where the tempo gradually increases or decreases.

The most essential practice tool for any musician is, of course, a metronome. Maintaining a consistent sense of time, whether for a solo performance or playing together with a group, takes practice. A metronome is the best tool for the job.

For a piece of music or an exercise with one tempo, this is simple enough. There are plenty of free metronomes that can be found online, and also many apps to choose from on your phone. Just set the tempo to whatever is indicated and start.

But what happens if the tempo changes part way through?

Practicing smaller sections

The simplest answer is to practice your music in sections. While learning the piece initially, breaking it up into smaller chunks is a good practice method, regardless. The tempo change would be a logical place to break it up. This allows you to stop the metronome and adjust the tempo while learning the smaller chunks separately. This is a good start, but it won’t hold up once you feel confident enough to play through the entire thing.

Using a click track

The second option is to use a click track or a recording. If you’re learning music for band class or if you’ve purchased a composition, you might have access to a pre-recorded click track. This is usually just a plain audio file that plays a standard metronome click for the exact length of the piece of music and includes any tempo changes. Similarly, you might be able to play along with a recording of the music, especially if you’re trying to learn a popular song.

This is probably a better option if you’re confident that you can play through the entire song or exercise without getting lost, even if you still have a few mistakes. However, this method becomes tricky if you aren’t starting from the top each time. Finding a starting point partway through can be cumbersome since there won’t be a proper count-off or an indication of where the starting point is.

Additionally, if you’d like to start slow and work your way up to the indicated tempo, you would need multiple click tracks or try to manually slow down the audio file yourself. Sure, this can work, but the more barriers there are to an easy practice session, the more difficult it is to be consistent and achieve your goals.

The best of both

As musicians and percussion instructors ourselves, we built Subdivide to solve for these challenges. Let’s check out how easy it is to set up a Subdivide track for any song, exercise, or even a full musical production.

Step one is to download Subdivide; you can find us on the App Store here: https://www.subdivide.app/download

Subdivide includes a full-featured metronome, which is completely free along with a lot of customization options. You can also try out our “tracks” feature for two weeks at no cost. We hope that will give you enough time to play around with it and see how much easier it is to practice with, but you can of course cancel any time before the free trial ends.

We’ll start by going to the “Tracks” tab and creating a new track.

For our example, let’s say we have a piece of music with the following structure:

1. 8 measures at 100 BPM with a 4/4 time signature.
2. 4 measures of an accelerando that increases the BPM to 154.
3. 12 measures at 154 BPM with a 3/4 time signature.
4. 10 measures at 132 BPM with a 4/4 time signature.

We’ll start by adding a regular section. This will allow us to set a single tempo and choose how many measures/bars it will play for and adjust the beats per bar, including customizing accents and subdivisions.

For our piece of music, we’ll enter the first chunk in this section: 8 bars at 100 BPM.

Next, we’ll add another component. This time we’ll select the transition option, since we’re gradually increasing the tempo from 100 to 154. The transition allows us to enter a starting and ending tempo, and then customize multiple sections within that tempo change. In this case, we only need one section since the tempo change happens over 4 complete bars.

Now we can add our last two regular sections. First, 12 bars at 154 BPM. This time, changing the number of beats in each bar to 3 since it’s in 3/4 time.

Finally, our last section, returning to 4 beats per bar and reducing the tempo to 132.

And that’s it. Our simple track is ready to go; just head back to the track player and press the play button. By default, tracks start from the top, but you can tap on any section to change the starting position. You can further customize the track by adding a count off, or setting it to repeat if you want to keep practicing continuously.

To show how easy it is, here’s a video of the entire process of creating this track.

Hopefully this basic example demonstrates how simple it is to create powerful practice tools with Subdivide. Tracks can support any number of sections. And feel free to give them labels to keep track of where each section is in the music. This is also a great place to use section markers or letters if they’re included in your sheet music.

To get access to the track we just made, scan the QR code below or press “Get track” on your phone to add it to your app.