Online Metronome
A steady click for practice, from 20 to 300 beats per minute. Set the beats per bar, accent the downbeat, add subdivisions, or tap the tempo you want.
How it works
- 1Set the tempo with the slider, the plus and minus buttons, or tap tempo.
- 2Choose beats per bar and how many clicks per beat.
- 3Press Start, or hit the space bar, and play along.
Practising with a metronome
A metronome makes timing problems audible. When you rush a hard passage or drag after a shift, the click tells you right away. The usual method is to slow the passage down until you can play it perfectly, then raise the tempo in small steps over days rather than minutes.
Accenting the first beat of each bar helps you keep your place in the bar, which matters for waltzes, odd meters and anything with long rests. The accented click is higher and louder than the others.
Subdivisions
At slow tempos it's hard to place notes between the clicks. Subdivisions fill in the gaps with quieter clicks: eighths split each beat in two, triplets in three, sixteenths in four. Practising scales against triplets and sixteenths is one of the fastest ways to make fast runs even.
Finding the tempo of a song
If you want to practise along with a recording, use tap tempo while the song plays, or try our BPM finder for tapping and our BPM detector to analyse an audio file automatically. Then set the metronome a little slower and work up to the original speed.
Hearing the click over your instrument
Drums, brass and amplified guitar can drown out a laptop speaker. Use headphones, turn the metronome volume up, or switch on subdivisions so there are more clicks to lock on to.