Online Metronome

How to use it

1. Set the tempo. Drag the slider, press the ± buttons, type a number into the BPM box, or tap Tap tempo four or five times at the speed you want. The tap reading uses the median of your taps, so one fumbled tap does not throw it off.
2. Pick the bar. Tap a time-signature chip, or set beats per bar and the beat note by hand for anything unusual.
3. Shape the bar. Tap the beat lamps to cycle each beat through accent, normal, soft and silent. That is how you get 7/8 as 2+2+3, or a bar with a hole in it where you have to place a note from memory.
4. Press Start — or the space bar. ↑ and ↓ move the tempo, T taps, M mutes.

Tempo, BPM, and the numbers underneath

BPM is beats per minute, and it is the only tempo unit that means the same thing to everyone. 60 BPM is one beat a second; 120 BPM is two. Everything else — Allegro, a conductor’s hand, “about the speed of the record” — is an approximation of a number.

Two conversions matter outside practice. One beat lasts 60,000 ÷ BPM milliseconds, which is the number you need for delay and reverb times; and BPM ÷ 60 is the pulse as a frequency in hertz. Both are displayed live beside the tempo. At 120 BPM a beat is 500 ms:

Change the tempo and every figure scales with it: at 90 BPM a beat is 666.7 ms, so a sixteenth is 166.7 ms. The metronome shows the current beat length so you never have to do this by hand.

Tempo markings: Largo, Andante, Allegro and the rest

Printed music usually gives a word rather than a number, and the words came first — Maelzel’s metronome was patented in 1815, centuries after composers started writing adagio at the top of a page. That is why the ranges below disagree between editions: they are descriptions of character that were fitted to numbers afterwards, not definitions. Treat them as a starting point, then let the music decide.

The metronome names the marking for whatever tempo you set, so you can work in either direction: dial 92 and read Andante, or hunt for Allegretto and find it at 112.

Time signatures, including the awkward ones

The top number of a time signature is how many beats are in a bar; the bottom number is which note value gets one of those beats. This metronome follows that literally — the BPM you set is the speed of the bottom number — which is what every hardware metronome does and what makes 6/8 click six times.

• 4/4 — common time. Four beats, accent on one. Nearly all pop, rock and folk.
• 3/4 — waltz. Three beats, and the accent on one is doing a lot of work: without it 3/4 and 6/8 sound identical.
• 2/2 — cut time, or alla breve. Two half-note beats per bar. Written as if it were 4/4 and counted in two, so marches and fast swing stay readable at speed.
• 6/8, 9/8, 12/8 — compound meters. Each pulse divides into three rather than two. Set six beats to learn the bar; set two beats with triplet subdivision to feel it the way it is conducted, with the dotted quarter as the pulse.
• 5/4, 7/8, 11/8 — odd meters. The count is the easy part; the grouping is the music. Use the beat lamps: 7/8 as 2+2+3 gets accents on 1, 3 and 5, and suddenly it walks instead of stumbling.

Subdivisions: eighths, triplets, sixteenths and swing

A subdivision fills the space between clicks with quieter notes, and it is the fastest fix for the most common timing problem there is: notes that are individually in time but unevenly spaced between the beats. If your eighths rush, you cannot hear it against a quarter-note click — the beat arrives, you are on it, and the crime happened in the gap.

• Eighths— count “1 & 2 &”. The default diagnostic.
• Triplets— “1 trip-let”. Essential for shuffles, 6/8, and anything with a swung feel underneath it.
• Sixteenths— “1 e & a”. Where fills, ghost notes and fast passages live. Start slower than feels necessary.
• Swung eighths — the offbeat moves to the last third of the beat, which is exactly what a triplet with its middle note removed sounds like. That is what swing notation means, and hearing it beside straight eighths settles the question faster than any explanation.
• Dotted eighth + sixteenth — the offbeat lands three quarters of the way through the beat. Sharper than swing, and the backbone of a lot of marches and hard-rock riffs.

Accents, ghost notes and silent beats

Every beat lamp is a control. Tap one to move it through four states: accent (louder and higher — the downbeat), normal, soft (a quiet marker, useful for the weak beats of a compound meter), and silent.

Silent beats are more than a curiosity. Muting beat 1 forces you to hold the downbeat yourself while the rest of the bar checks you, which is a much harder and much more useful exercise than playing along with a click on every beat. Mute beats 2 and 4 and you are practising against a half-time feel; mute everything except beat 1 and you have one reference point per bar, which is roughly what playing with a band actually feels like.

Practice tools that do more than tick

Four things live in the Practice tools drawer, collapsed by default so that a page someone opened to get a click at 120 does not greet them with a control panel.

• Speed trainer. Set a start tempo, a target, a step and how many bars to hold each step. The metronome climbs on its own, so you never break concentration to nudge a slider. It ramps down too, which is a real drill — a passage you own at 140 often falls apart at 70, where there is nowhere to hide.
• Gap trainer. Plays a set number of bars, then goes silent for a set number while the lamps keep counting. You keep playing through the gap; the click returns and tells you the truth. This is the drill that builds an internal clock, because a click you can always hear will let you sit a fraction behind it forever without ever mentioning it.
• Practice timer.One tap for 1, 3, 5, 10 or 20 minutes. The metronome stops itself at the end, which turns “I should practise scales” into a thing with edges.
• Polyrhythm. Adds a second layer of evenly spaced notes across the bar — 3 against 4, 5 against 4, 7 against 4. Notes that would land on a main beat are dropped, so you hear only the cross-rhythm and can lock onto it as its own pulse.

How to practise with a metronome

The method has not changed in two hundred years, and most people skip the first step.

1. Find the tempo where it is clean, then drop 20%. Not the tempo where you get through it — the tempo where every note is even, in tune and deliberate. Speed is a by-product of precision; practising at the edge of your control just rehearses the mistakes.
2. Subdivide. Turn on eighths or sixteenths so the gaps between beats are policed too.
3. Move by 5 BPM, and only when it is boring.“Pretty good” is not the signal. Let the speed trainer do the arithmetic.
4. Then take the click away. Gap-train the same passage. If it survives four silent bars, you own it.

Guitarists and bassists: put the click on 2 and 4 instead of every beat — mute beats 1 and 3 — and your sense of groove will improve faster than from any amount of playing along with all four. Pianists: practise hands separately at a tempo where both hands are equally clean, which is usually the weaker hand’s tempo, not the average. Drummers: the metronome belongs on the hi-hat subdivision you are actually playing, not on the quarter note, or you will never hear the unevenness inside a fill. Singers and wind players: use the silent-mode lamps, so the click is never competing with the tone you are trying to listen to.

Why browser metronomes drift, and why this one does not

Almost every metronome that has ever felt slightly wrong in a browser was built on setInterval. That function promises only that it will not fire early. A garbage collection, a layout, a busy processor, a background tab — each one delivers the callback a few milliseconds late, and a metronome that plays a click when its callback arrives keeps every one of those delays. The errors add up in one direction, and twenty minutes later you are practising to something that is no longer the tempo you set.

This one never plays a click from a timer. A scheduler wakes up several times a second, looks a fraction of a second into the future, and hands the Web Audio clock the exact start time of every click in that window. That clock runs on the audio hardware’s own high-priority thread and is accurate to the sample. A late wake-up costs nothing, because the clicks it was going to schedule were already scheduled by the previous one. Every beat time is derived from the running beat count rather than from “now”, so the error after two thousand beats is the same as after two.

The same clock drives the lamps and the pendulum: the visuals are timed from the audio clock, with your device’s output latency added, rather than from a separate animation timer. That is why the flash lands on the click instead of near it — including on a Bluetooth speaker, where the sound arrives a visible fraction of a second late.

Tune first, then keep time

A metronome fixes when you play a note. It has no opinion about whether the note was right. If your instrument has drifted, an hour of perfectly timed practice is an hour of learning a passage slightly out of tune — so tune first, then start the click.

The free chromatic tuner on this site listens through your microphone and shows how far off you are in cents, and there are dedicated pages with the right target notes already loaded for guitar, bass, ukulele, violin, piano and thirty more instruments. When your ear is the thing you want to sharpen rather than your timing, the ear trainer measures how small a pitch difference you can actually hear.

Frequently asked questions

Tempo can be typed anywhere from 10 to 1000 BPM. Nothing on this page is recorded or uploaded — the metronome makes sound, it does not listen.