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I have a curious request. I'm a drummer, and I sometimes practice by setting my metronome to increase 1BPM every 2 measures. At first, the increase is very slow, almost unnoticeable, and it takes a few clicks before I find myself noticing that I have to speed up. However, as the BPM increases, each additional increase of 1 BPM is noticed more and more. Put differently, my session takes longer from 100 to 150 BPM than it does from 150 to 200 BPM, even though it's increasing at the same rate (every 8 beats), so the latter speed-up is much faster.

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You might want to mention the type of metronome you have since this would be trivially solved by a metronome that could increase 1 bpm every 4.8 seconds. – Matthew Read♦ Feb 6 at 23:45
@MatthewRead: ah but i didn't realize that when I posted my question. an answer could have been "increase every 4.8 seconds instead of every 8 beats". – Claudiu Feb 7 at 19:58
Please explain how you arrived at 'every 4.8 secs'.Surely that would involve a different number of bars at different tempos,and Claudiu keeps a tempo for 2 bars, not a particular amount of time.It sounds to me like there would be a different no. of beats for each/some tempos, and isn't the idea to play in bars of probably 4 ? – Tim Mar 21 at 18:05

1 Answer

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I managed to figure it out while asking the question. The reason is that 8 beats happens more and more quickly. At 100 bpm, 8 beats takes 4800 milliseconds, yet at 150bpm, it only takes 3200ms. I came up with a schedule of how to program a beat-only metronome so the increases are as close to 1 bpm every 4800ms as possible:

At 100bpm, increase 1 bpm every 8 beats for 7 measures
At 107bpm, increase 1 bpm every 9 beats for 12 measures
At 119bpm, increase 1 bpm every 10 beats for 13 measures
At 132bpm, increase 1 bpm every 11 beats for 12 measures
At 144bpm, increase 1 bpm every 12 beats for 13 measures
At 157bpm, increase 1 bpm every 13 beats for 12 measures
At 169bpm, increase 1 bpm every 14 beats for 13 measures
At 182bpm, increase 1 bpm every 15 beats for 12 measures
At 194bpm, increase 1 bpm every 16 beats for 7 measures
At 200bpm, done!

I'm listening to this schedule now and it seems to work as I thought it would. Fun stuff!

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hmm my code seems to not work when I spaced the inner lines, how come? – Claudiu Feb 6 at 21:49
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We have a jTab plugin here that gets applied to code blocks. Use <pre> blocks instead. – Matthew Read♦ Feb 6 at 23:44
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ah thanks, you might want to update the formatting help – Claudiu Feb 7 at 5:16
We've been waiting: meta.music.stackexchange.com/q/473/28 – Matthew Read♦ Feb 7 at 17:04

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