Speed Upp for Mac

An adaptive and programmable metronome for musicians, Speed Upp for Mac can help you improve your training speed and precision. It works by facilitating scale exercises and chromatic drills as you practice with your musical instruments.

Pros

Highly customizable: Speed Upp for Mac makes it easy for you to set tempo changes. As such, the 34-column graph (with up to 600 clicks per column) can be preset with tempo markings, so you can continuously use your hands on your instrument as you train with tempo changes indicated on the onscreen graph. You can also draw your own drills on the graph using the mouse.

Sound hints: To alert you of an upcoming tempo change, the application sounds off high and low pitch clicks.

Intuitive shortcut keys: You can use the Spacebar to pause and play the application, Enter/Return key to replay from the start, the Up and Down arrow keys to change tempo by 5 bpm, and the Left and Right keys to hop into columns in the graph.

Cons

No presets on the free version: Again, you need to upgrade to Pro if you want to be able to use presets. The ability to save and use presets is very helpful even though you can only save up to six presets.

Bottom Line

Speed Upp for Mac breaks the monotony of playing scales with just one beat rate, proving to be a useful tool for musicians. The keyboard shortcuts make it highly accessible, yet to enjoy it to its full capacity you have to buy the Pro version. That said, even the free version remains a good download, despite its limitations.