Online Metronome
A free, accurate metronome that runs in your browser. Set the tempo, pick a time signature, and press Start — or tap the beat you want.
How to Use This Metronome
- Set your tempo with the slider, the − and + buttons, or the arrow keys.
- Choose how many beats are in a measure. Four is the default; three gives you a waltz feel, six suits compound time.
- Pick a subdivision if you want clicks between the beats — eighths, triplets, or sixteenths.
- Press Start, or hit the space bar. The dots light in time, with the accented downbeat larger and brighter.
If you know the tempo by feel but not by number, press Tap — or the T key — along with the music a few times, and the metronome will work out the BPM for you.
Keyboard Shortcuts
- Space — start or stop
- ↑ / → — tempo up 1 BPM
- ↓ / ← — tempo down 1 BPM
- T — tap tempo
How to Actually Practise With a Metronome
Most people use a metronome as a pass/fail test: put it on, play the piece, feel bad. That is not what it is for. Used properly it is a diagnostic tool, and the diagnosis is usually more useful than the discipline.
Start slower than feels reasonable
The tempo to practise at is the fastest one where you can play the passage perfectly, not the fastest one where you can get through it. If you cannot play it cleanly three times in a row, you are practising your mistakes rather than the music. Drop the tempo until you can.
Raise the tempo in small steps
Once three clean repetitions are comfortable, add about 5 BPM. If it falls apart, go back down. Progress is not linear and there will be a speed where you stall for days — that is normal, and it is where the actual learning happens.
Isolate the bar that breaks
When a piece falls apart, it is almost never the whole piece. It is one or two bars, usually a position shift or an awkward change. Loop just those bars at a tempo where they work, then rejoin them to the surrounding music.
Try clicking on beats 2 and 4
Once a steady four-on-the-floor click feels easy, set the metronome to half your tempo and hear it as beats 2 and 4 rather than 1 and 3. This is much harder and far more musical — it is how drummers and jazz players internalise time, and it exposes rushing that a click on every beat hides.
Then turn it off
The goal is not to depend on a click. Play a passage with the metronome, then immediately play it without and notice where you drift. That comparison is the whole point.
Tempo Markings
Written music often gives tempo as an Italian word rather than a number. The rough BPM equivalents this metronome uses:
- Grave — 25 to 40 BPM, very slow and solemn
- Largo — 40 to 60 BPM, broad
- Adagio — 60 to 76 BPM, slow and stately
- Andante — 76 to 108 BPM, walking pace
- Moderato — 108 to 120 BPM, moderate
- Allegro — 120 to 156 BPM, fast and bright
- Vivace — 156 to 176 BPM, lively
- Presto — 176 to 200 BPM, very fast
- Prestissimo — above 200 BPM, as fast as possible
Treat these as approximate. They were descriptions of character before they were measurements of speed, and different periods and composers used them differently.
Why Browser Metronomes Often Drift
It is worth knowing why some free web metronomes wander, because it affects whether you can trust one.
The naive way to build a metronome is to call setInterval at the beat interval and play a sound each time it fires. This does not work well. JavaScript timers are not precise — they are subject to a minimum clamp, they queue behind other work on the main thread, and browsers deliberately throttle them in background tabs, sometimes to once per second. Errors accumulate, so a metronome built this way can drift audibly within a minute.
This metronome uses the approach that solves it. A timer still runs, but it never plays anything directly — it only looks ahead, finds the beats due in the next fraction of a second, and schedules them on the Web Audio clock with explicit start times. That clock runs on the audio hardware and is sample-accurate. The JavaScript timer can be late and the beats still land exactly where they should.
Metronome and Tuner Together
Tuning and timing are the two things worth getting right before anything else, and they are both quick. Tune first with our free chromatic guitar tuner, then set a tempo here and start.
One practical note: if you want to use the tuner and metronome at the same time, stop the metronome before tuning. The tuner listens through your microphone, and it will hear the clicks along with your strings.
Other tools: the chromatic guitar tuner, bass tuner, ukulele tuner, and our guitar tuning articles.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a metronome used for?
A metronome sounds a steady click at a tempo you choose, giving you an external reference for time. Practising against one exposes the places where you unconsciously rush or drag — almost always the difficult bars — and trains you to hold a steady pulse instead.
What tempo should I practise at?
Slow enough to play the passage perfectly, which is usually slower than feels satisfying. If you cannot play it cleanly three times in a row, the tempo is too fast. Once you can, raise it by about 5 BPM and repeat.
How does tap tempo work?
Press the Tap button, or the T key, in time with the music at least twice. The metronome averages the gaps between your last few taps and sets that as the BPM. Pausing for more than two seconds starts a fresh measurement.
Is this metronome accurate?
Yes. It schedules each click directly on the Web Audio clock, which is sample-accurate, rather than relying on JavaScript timers. Browser timers drift and get throttled — especially in background tabs — which is why many simple web metronomes wander noticeably over a minute or two. This one does not.
What do the subdivision buttons do?
They add quieter clicks between the main beats: two for eighths, three for triplets, four for sixteenths. The main beats stay at your set BPM. Subdivisions are useful when a rhythm is hard to place, because they give you the smaller grid the notes actually sit on.
Why does the metronome need a click to start?
Browsers block audio until you interact with the page, to stop sites from making noise on their own. Pressing Start is that interaction — after it, the metronome can sound freely.