Free Online Metronome
Tap the tempo or type it in, set the meter and the accents, and practise. A tempo trainer to take a passage up to speed, and gap clicks to find out whether your time is really steady.
Accents
Press a beat to change how it sounds. Silent beats leave a gap you have to fill yourself, which is a good way to test whether you are really keeping time.
Practising with this
Set the tempo, choose the meter, press Start. If a passage is not clean, it is nearly always too fast: drop twenty beats, play it accurately three times in a row, and only then let the tempo trainer take it back up.
- Tap tempo finds the speed of a recording. Tap along for four or more beats.
- Accents mark the shape of the bar. Silence a beat you should be feeling rather than hearing.
- Gap clicks are the honest test. Anyone can play along with a click; holding the tempo through two silent bars is a different matter.
Everything runs in this browser. Nothing is recorded and nothing is uploaded; your tempo, presets and settings are saved on this device only.
How to practise with a metronome
Start slower than feels necessary
The tempo that improves a difficult passage is the one where you can play it correctly every time, without bracing for the hard bar. That is usually a good deal slower than most people are willing to go. Practising it fast and wrong simply makes being wrong more automatic.
Move up in small steps
Four or five beats per minute at a time is plenty. Small enough and your hands barely notice the change; too big a jump and the old problem comes straight back. The tempo trainer here does this for you: set the start, the target and the step, and let it climb while you keep playing.
Put the click somewhere useful
A click on every beat is the obvious setting and not always the best one. Silencing beats one and three, so the click lands only on two and four, forces you to hold the bar together yourself. Turning the tempo down and letting one click cover a whole bar is harder still. Both are more demanding than they sound.
Then turn it off
Once the passage is reliable, play it without the click and listen to whether it still holds together. Real playing is not metronomic, and a piece that only works with a click running is not finished. The metronome tells you whether your time is steady; it cannot tell you whether the music is any good.
Tempo markings and time signatures
A tempo marking in a score is a description, not a specification. Largo, Andante, Allegro and the rest describe a character as much as a speed, and the ranges attached to them have never been universally agreed. The term shown above the tempo here is a guide, so you know roughly where a marked tempo sits.
The time signature tells you how the bar is counted. The top number is how many units make a bar and the bottom number says which note counts as one. 4/4 is four quarter notes; 3/4 is the waltz. Compound meters are the ones that catch people out: 6/8 is written as six eighth notes but felt as two, each a dotted quarter, which is why this metronome counts it in two rather than putting six identical clicks in the bar.
Odd meters such as 5/4 and 7/8 are counted in groups. Seven is usually felt as 2+2+3 or 3+2+2 rather than seven even beats, and the accent editor is the place to set that: mark the first beat of each group as strong or secondary and the bar stops feeling like an awkward count and starts feeling like a groove.
Common questions
What tempo should I practise at?
Slow enough to play the passage accurately every single time. If you are making the same mistake in the same bar, the tempo is too high, however slow it feels. A useful test is three clean repetitions in a row before you move the tempo up at all.
What does BPM mean?
Beats per minute: how many beats the metronome plays in a minute. 60 BPM is one beat a second. In a compound meter such as 6/8, the number refers to the dotted-beat pulse you actually count, not to each individual eighth note.
How does the tempo trainer work?
You set a starting tempo, a target, how much to add and how often. The metronome then raises the tempo by that amount every few bars until it reaches the target, and either stops there or starts again from the bottom. It is the standard way of taking a passage from careful to performance speed without skipping the middle.
What is a gap-click trainer for?
The click falls silent for a bar or two and then returns. Playing along with a constant click is easy, because you can lean on it and correct as you go. Holding steady through the silence and finding the click exactly where you expect it is a much better measure of whether your sense of time is genuinely reliable.
Is this metronome accurate?
Every click is scheduled in advance against the browser's audio clock rather than being fired by a timer at the moment it should sound. That matters: an ordinary JavaScript timer drifts, and is throttled outright in a background tab, while the audio clock runs at the sample rate of your sound hardware.
Should I always practise with a metronome?
No. It is a measuring tool, not a musical one. Use it to build reliable time and to check that a tempo is genuinely under control, then switch it off and play the phrase musically, with the small give and take that makes it sound like music rather than a drum machine.
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