There is no set answer to any of these questions. Sometimes riding a smooth wave of 10 BPM increments is the answer, whereas others you need to break the wave sharply to change things up or keep things at the pace they are going. The answers will depend on your judgment at the moment of what will work at the time given how many people are dancing, how many people appear to be grumbling, how many are about to leave unless you shake things up immediately, or how many people are just fine with you leaving it exactly the way it is.Skippy wrote:What, in your opinion, is an acceptable bpm jump - either up or down, when building the wave?
do you go up in lots of 10bpm or some other approximate figure?
how low do you start and how high do you peak?
do you have a high frequency of shorter waves or a smaller frequency of longer waves?
That's not just true of BPMs, but of any element of the music you play, incluing the "energy" of a song or the style of a song: vintage/groove, Blues/Jazz, big-band/small-band, soft/hard, push the envelope/standard, etc. Sometimes a completely random change is necessary to search for and find what the people want that night.