Metronome
Practice in perfect time. Set 30–300 BPM with the slider, tap the tempo with your fingers, or jump to a classical marking like Allegro. Accent patterns, subdivisions and multiple click sounds are built in — and a lookahead scheduler keeps every beat exactly on time.
Metronome
Tempo
Drag the slider, type a number, or tap the buttons — 30 to 300 BPM.
Rhythm
How many beats in each bar. The first beat is accented by default.
Extra clicks between beats — great for fast passages.
Sound
Generated live with the Web Audio API — no audio files, works offline.
Play
Tap the Tap tempo button in rhythm with your music — the BPM follows your tapping. Press Space to start/stop, ↑/↓ to change tempo.
How a Metronome Works: BPM, Beats, and Bars
A metronome does one beautifully simple thing: it marks perfectly even slices of time so your playing can lock onto them. The speed is measured in BPM — beats per minute. At 60 BPM you hear one click per second; at 120 BPM, two clicks per second. The conversion is direct: divide 60,000 by the BPM to get the milliseconds between clicks. So 100 BPM means a click every 600 ms, 80 BPM every 750 ms, and this tool's maximum of 300 BPM fires every 200 ms — five clicks a second, faster than most people can play sixteenth notes. Every tempo marking musicians use, from a stately Largo around 50 BPM to a flying Presto near 180, is just a named neighborhood on this one number line, and the preset markings above the slider let you jump straight to them.
Beats group into bars, and the time signature says how. The top number is the beats per bar: 4/4 means four beats per bar (nearly all pop, rock, and hip-hop), 3/4 means three (waltzes and much folk music), 2/4 means two (marches and polkas), 5/4 means five (that off-kilter progressive-rock feel). The bottom number says which note value gets one beat — 4 means a quarter note. Then there's 6/8, the odd one out: it's compound time, felt as two big pulses with three subdivisions each (“ONE-and-a TWO-and-a”), the heartbeat of jigs, ballads, and slow blues shuffles. The metronome's first beat of each bar clicks louder automatically — that accent is your compass. Lose count and the next loud click tells you exactly where the bar restarts.
Between the main beats lives the subdivision — extra clicks that slice each beat into equal parts. Eighth-note subdivision gives two clicks per beat, triplets give three, sixteenths give four. This is the metronome's secret weapon for fast passages: at 100 BPM, quarter-note clicks leave 600 ms gaps your brain must fill in alone; sixteenth-note subdivision fills those gaps with a click every 150 ms, so a tricky run of fast notes gets one click per note instead of one click per four notes. If a passage keeps falling apart at speed, the problem is rarely the tempo — it's that your ears can't hear where the small notes belong. Subdivisions hand you those slots directly.
The accent dots let you customize which beats pop. Tap a dot to cycle it through accented, normal, and muted. Want the backbeat feel with beats 2 and 4 emphasized for rock? Accent those and soften 1 and 3. Practicing a syncopated rhythm? Mute the beats you tend to rush and let the metronome hold only the ones you drag. Drummers use this to drill limb independence; pianists use it to stop the left hand from rushing the right. The tap-tempo button works in reverse: tap along with a recording and the tool averages your taps into a BPM reading, so you can discover that the song you've been “playing at about 120” is actually 127.
All of this sound is synthesized live in your browser with the Web Audio API — no audio files to download, no streaming, no delay from a server round-trip. That matters for timing: the clicks are scheduled with sample-accurate precision, and the tool keeps working with no internet connection once the page has loaded. Three click voices — the sharp Click, the woody Woodblock, the pure Beep — cover different instruments and rooms: a woodblock cuts through an acoustic guitar where a beep would vanish, and the beep sits politely under a piano where a click would grate. Volume is yours to balance: loud enough to follow, quiet enough to still hear yourself.
Worked Example: Learning a Song at 120 BPM in 4/4
The setup
Jonas plays guitar and wants to learn the verse of a pop song recorded at 120 BPM in 4/4. He can stumble through it at 90 BPM, but it falls apart at full speed. His plan — the one nearly every music teacher prescribes: start slow, raise the tempo in small steps, and let the metronome be the boss for two weeks.
Step 1 — Translate BPM into time
At 120 BPM, beats land every 500 ms (60,000 ÷ 120) — two per second. Jonas sets the metronome to 70 BPM instead: a click every 857 ms, slow enough to think between notes. He selects 4/4 so beat one accents each bar, giving him a reset point every four clicks. He plays the eight-bar verse three times cleanly at 70 before touching the tempo. “Cleanly” is the rule: if he flubs a note, the tempo doesn't move.
Step 2 — Climb in small steps
Each practice day, Jonas raises the tempo by 4 BPM with the + button — 70, 74, 78 — playing the verse until it's clean at each step before advancing. Four BPM is small enough that his hands barely notice, but over ten days it compounds from 70 to 110. The slider is for big jumps; the stepper buttons are for the daily grind. When a step feels shaky, he stays there an extra day instead of pushing through sloppiness — practicing mistakes at speed just teaches the mistakes faster.
Step 3 — Subdivide the hard bar
Bar six has a run of sixteenth notes that keeps tangling his fingers. At 90 BPM the quarter-note clicks are 667 ms apart — four fast notes per gap, and his timing drifts. He switches the subdivision to sixteenths: now there's a click every 167 ms, one per note of the run. Suddenly he can hear exactly which note rushes. Two days of the run against sixteenth clicks, then he switches back to quarter clicks at 100 BPM and the bar holds together on its own.
Step 4 — Arrive at tempo, then own it
Two weeks in, Jonas plays the verse cleanly at 120 BPM — 500 ms per beat, the accented downbeat cycling exactly like the recording. For the final test he uses tap tempo: he taps along with the original recording and the tool reads 120 BPM, confirming his internal clock now matches the record. He keeps the metronome on for one more week at 120, then tries the verse without it. It stays steady — which was the entire point. The metronome was never the performance; it was the scaffolding.
Practicing Smarter: Tempo Strategies That Work
The slow-climb in the example is the foundation, but a few more strategies multiply its effect. The 80% rule: find the fastest tempo where you can play a passage three times in a row with zero mistakes — that's your working tempo, usually around 80% of the target — and start every session there before climbing. Spot-practice the transitions: most breakdowns happen at bar lines, so loop just the two beats before and after the trouble spot rather than replaying the whole piece. Flip the subdivision: practice a passage with triplet clicks even when the music is straight eighths (and vice versa) — it exposes rushing you can't hear otherwise. Record the metronome test: once a week, record yourself playing with the click and listen back the next day; the recording hears timing flaws your in-the-moment brain forgives. And use tap tempo before every new song: ten seconds of tapping along with the reference recording gives you the true target number, so every step of your climb aims at the right summit.
Common Metronome Mistakes
The metronome only works if you work with it. These are the ways players sabotage it:
- Starting at full speed. The classic error: setting 140 BPM on day one, muscling through mistakes, and “practicing” the wrong notes into muscle memory. Speed is a byproduct of accuracy, never the other way around. Start at 50–60% of target tempo — slow enough to play perfectly — and earn each 4–5 BPM increase with clean repetitions.
- Fighting the click instead of following it. When the metronome feels like it's rushing or dragging, it's almost never the metronome — it's you. That discomfort is the tool doing its job: revealing that you rush the easy bars and drag the hard ones. The fix isn't to nudge the tempo to match your habit; it's to adjust your playing until the discomfort disappears. Record yourself if you don't believe the click.
- Jumping tempo in big leaps. Going from 80 to 100 BPM in one move skips the entire zone where your hands actually learn. The learning happens in the 4–5 BPM increments that feel almost too easy — that's the feeling of new pathways forming without errors. Boring practice is effective practice; exciting practice is usually sloppy practice.
- Practicing fast passages on quarter-note clicks only. At high tempos the gaps between clicks are canyons, and your subdivisions fall in however they please. Switch on eighth or sixteenth subdivisions for technical passages so every small note gets its own reference click. Then switch back to quarters — you'll find the passage mysteriously “easier,” because your ears learned where the notes live.
- Wrong time signature, wrong feel. Practicing a 3/4 waltz against 4/4 accents trains your body to expect a fourth beat that never comes in the real piece — you'll stumble at every bar line on stage. Set the signature to match the music before you start, and use the accent dots deliberately: the loud beat-one click should land where the music's downbeat lands.
- Volume wars. Too quiet and you can't hear the click over your instrument, so you guess — defeating the purpose. Too loud and you can't hear your own tone, so you play worse to follow better. Set the volume so the click is clearly present but your instrument stays the star. In a loud room, the woodblock voice cuts through better than the beep.
- Never checking with tap tempo. You think the band plays the song at 130; the recording is actually 138, and you've been rehearsing the wrong feel for a month. Ten seconds of tapping along with the reference recording gives you the true number. Use it before you start the slow-climb process, so every step aims at the right summit.
A metronome is the most honest practice partner you'll ever have: it never gets tired, never lies to spare your feelings, and never rushes the hard bars. The musicians who improve fastest aren't the ones with the most talent — they're the ones who submit to the click daily, climb in small steps, and subdivide the hard parts. Fifteen focused minutes with a metronome beats an hour of hopeful repetition. Set the tempo, trust the click, and let the scaffolding do its work.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How accurate is this metronome?
Very: it uses the Web Audio API with a lookahead scheduler that plans each click 0.1 seconds ahead on a 25 ms timer. Beat times advance by an exact interval, so long sessions cannot drift the way naive setInterval timers do.
How does tap tempo work?
Tap the Tap tempo button in rhythm. It measures your last few taps, takes the median interval (robust against one shaky tap), and converts it to BPM. Pause for 2.5 seconds to start a fresh series.
Can I mute or accent individual beats?
Yes — tap any beat dot to cycle it through accent (higher click), normal, and mute. The first beat of the bar starts accented, like a real conductor’s downbeat.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes. Everything is touch-friendly with large controls, the tap-tempo button is big enough to hit while holding an instrument, and no app install is needed.