150 BPM Metronome

One hundred and fifty beats per minute is genuinely fast. It is inside the vivace marking, and it is the tempo at which the physical demands of playing start to compete with the musical ones. A drummer playing straight eighths on the hi-hat at 150 is making five strokes per second with one hand for the length of a song, which is an endurance problem before it is a technique problem.

Punk and hardcore live here and above. So does a lot of thrash, where 150 is roughly the slow end. Fast jazz, particularly bebop heads taken at speed, sits in this range too, though the swung eighths make it feel different from the straight-eighth rock equivalent. In dance music, 150 is the fast edge of techno and the slow edge of hardcore and gabber.

For practice, the important thing at 150 BPM is not to fight it. Players who tense up here get slower, not faster, because tension kills rebound. Work in short bursts: four bars at tempo, four bars rest, rather than long unbroken stretches. Use the speed trainer to arrive at 150 from below rather than starting here cold, and if your technique degrades, drop back twenty BPM and rebuild. Endurance improves faster from clean repetitions than from grinding through sloppy ones.