Free online metronome

How to practise with a metronome

Start slower than you think. Find the tempo where you can play a passage cleanly three times in a row, then raise it by two to five BPM. When it starts to fall apart, go back down a step. Slow, clean repetitions build the movement; fast, sloppy ones build the mistakes.

Listen to the click, not just your hands. The goal is for your note to land so close to the click that the click seems to disappear. If you can still hear it clearly on every beat, you are a little ahead or a little behind.

Use subdivisions when a rhythm feels rushed. Eighths or sixteenths fill the space between beats and show you exactly where the off-beats belong. Once it feels steady, go back to quarter notes, then try clicking only on beats 2 and 4, like a drummer's backbeat, or only on beat 1, so your own time carries the rest.

Tempo markings and BPM

Classical scores give tempo as an Italian word rather than a number. These are the usual ranges printed on metronomes. They overlap, and every era and edition reads them a little differently, so treat them as a starting point:

Larghissimo, below 24 BPM: as slow as possible. Grave, 25 to 45: very slow and solemn. Largo, 40 to 60: broad. Lento, 45 to 60: slow. Adagio, 66 to 76: slow, at ease. Andante, 76 to 108: at a walking pace. Moderato, 108 to 120: moderate. Allegro, 120 to 156: fast and bright. Vivace, 156 to 176: lively. Presto, 168 to 200: very fast. Prestissimo, above 200: as fast as possible.

The metronome shows the marking under the BPM as you change it, so you always know roughly which word a score would use.

Time signatures, accents and compound meters

The top number of a time signature is how many beats a bar has; the bottom number is which note gets the beat. In 4/4 and 3/4 the click falls on quarter notes. In 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8 it falls on eighth notes, grouped in threes, so we give beat 4 of a 6/8 bar (and 7 and 10 in the longer meters) a slightly stronger click. Odd meters like 5/8 and 7/8 come grouped as 3+2 and 2+2+3, and you can regroup them by clicking the beats.

Each beat has three states. Click it once for a normal beat, again to silence it, and again for an accent. Silent beats are a good test: mute beats 2 and 3 of a 4/4 bar and see if you still arrive on beat 4 with the click.

Why the timing stays steady

Browsers are busy, and a timer in a web page can wake up late by tens of milliseconds. So we never use the timer to play the click. A small background timer looks a little ahead and hands each click to the audio clock with its exact time, and the audio hardware plays it on that sample. The result is the same spacing between every click, however busy the page is, and a tempo change that lands cleanly on the next beat.

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