Foundations
Choosing a practice tempo (and when to raise it)
Written by a guitar teacher who runs a private studio in Japan. Published September 18, 2026
“Practice it slowly” is good advice that almost nobody can act on, because it does not say how slowly, or what has to be true before you go faster. Both questions have practical answers.
Start where the mistakes stop
The right starting tempo is the fastest one at which you can play the passage correctly three times in a row — not nearly correctly. A fingering that lands late, a string that buzzes, a chord change you brace for: any of these means the tempo is still too fast to be teaching you the passage. It is teaching you the recovery.
That last point is the real cost of practicing too fast. Repetition makes whatever you actually did more automatic, including the flinch before the hard bar. Slow practice is not a moral virtue; it is the only speed at which you get to choose what gets memorized.
The test for moving up
Raise the tempo when you can play the passage three times in a row with attention to spare — you can notice the click, hear whether your tone is even, and think one bar ahead. If all your attention is spent on execution, you are at your limit, no matter how clean the result sounded.
Two extra checks that catch what “it sounded fine” misses:
- Start anywhere. Begin from the middle of the passage. If you can only start from the top, you have memorized a sequence rather than learned the material.
- Play it once more after a break. Come back ten minutes later and play it cold. What survives that is what you actually learned today.
How big a step
Small enough that the passage does not break. In practice this means around four to five percent — a few BPM at slow tempos, rather more at fast ones. Jumping by twenty at a time is what produces the familiar pattern of a passage that works at the slow tempo, collapses at the target tempo, and never gets fixed in between.
When a passage does break, go back one step and stay there for a few repetitions before trying again. Dropping all the way to the start wastes the work; staying at the broken tempo rehearses the break.
Do not practice only at target tempo
Players often decide on a target tempo and treat everything below it as a waiting room. But the tempo you perform at is rarely exact, and music played with other people moves. Spending part of each session deliberately above and below the target builds the flexibility to follow whatever actually happens.
A simple way to do this without fiddling with the dial mid-practice: use a sequence that steps through several tempos automatically, for example four bars at each of three tempos, looping. You keep playing; the metronome moves the target under you.
Keep a record
Write down the tempo you finished at, next to the date. Without it, the next session starts with a guess, and the guess is usually optimistic — which is how a passage ends up being practiced at a tempo it never actually passed at. Two numbers in a notebook remove the whole problem.
What all of this is for: Pulse, pattern, and why a metronome is only a scaffold