Online Metronome
Keep time with a steady, accurate click from 20 to 260 BPM. Set the tempo with the slider or tap it in, choose how many beats make a bar so the downbeat rings out, and press play.
Tap the beat four times or more — the tempo follows your taps.
Set a tempo and press Start — the first beat of each bar clicks higher.
Tap along with a song for a bar or two and read off its BPM.
Set the accent to your time signature — 3 for a waltz, 4 for common time — and beat one rings higher.
Drop the tempo until the passage is easy, then raise it a few BPM at a time.
A metronome marks equal slices of time with a click, giving your playing a fixed reference to lock onto. Practicing with one exposes the habits you can’t hear on your own — rushing the easy bars, dragging the hard ones, hesitating before a page turn — because every drift lands audibly ahead of or behind the beat. Pick a tempo in beats per minute (BPM), optionally accent the first beat of each bar, and play; the measure counter tracks how long you’ve stayed with it.
Timing is the whole product, so the clicks are scheduled with the Web Audio API rather than ordinary JavaScript timers. A setInterval-based metronome wobbles by tens of milliseconds whenever the browser is busy — audible as a limp in the beat. Here each click is placed on the audio hardware’s own clock a fraction of a second in advance, which keeps the spacing sample-accurate even under load. The accented beat clicks higher than the rest, and tap tempo averages the gaps between your last few taps.
How to practice with a metronome?
The click is a mirror, not a crutch — a few habits make it far more effective:
- Start slower than feels necessary, at a tempo where the passage is already perfect. Speed built on clean repetitions sticks.
- Raise the tempo 4–8 BPM at a time, and only after two or three flawless passes.
- Match the beats-per-bar to your time signature so beat one stands out — it stops you drifting a beat off unnoticed.
- Once a passage is comfortable, halve the BPM so the click lands on beats 2 and 4 only — it forces you to hold the time yourself.
- Use the measure counter for endurance: clean once is luck, eight bars in a row is progress.
Tempo markings
| Marking | BPM | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Grave | 20–40 | Very slow and solemn |
| Largo | 40–60 | Slow and broad |
| Adagio | 60–76 | Slow, at ease |
| Andante | 76–108 | A walking pace |
| Moderato | 108–120 | Moderate |
| Allegro | 120–156 | Fast and bright |
| Vivace | 156–176 | Lively and quick |
| Presto | 176–200 | Very fast |
| Prestissimo | 200+ | As fast as possible |