Metronome
A metronome plays a steady click at a tempo you set in beats per minute, so you can hear whether you are rushing or dragging. Set 120 BPM here and the click falls every 500 milliseconds, the readout labels it Allegretto, and with 4 beats per measure the first beat of each bar clicks higher than the other three.
About Metronome
This metronome is a click generator that runs inside the page. The slider covers 20 to 300 beats per minute, and the line under the number names the Italian tempo marking that speed falls under on this tool's scale: Grave from 20, Largo from 40, Lento from 55, Adagio from 66, Andante from 76, Andantino from 92, Moderato from 108, Allegretto from 120, Allegro from 132, Vivace from 152, Presto from 168 and Prestissimo from 200.
The spacing between clicks is 60,000 divided by the BPM, in milliseconds: 1,000 ms at 60 BPM, 500 ms at 120, 300 ms at 200 and 200 ms at the 300 BPM ceiling. Each click is a short synthesised tone, 800 Hz on an ordinary beat and 1,200 Hz on the accented first beat, that fades out over 80 milliseconds so fast tempos stay separate. You pick 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8 beats per bar and the row of dots shows which beat is sounding.
Tap Tempo reads a tempo from your own timing: it averages the gaps between your last eight taps, seven gaps at most, so four taps half a second apart give 120 BPM. Leave more than two seconds between taps and the measurement starts over, which means anything slower than about 30 BPM has to be set with the slider or one of the eight preset buttons.
The beat count is a beat count, not a full time signature: choosing 6 gives six equal clicks per bar rather than the two dotted-quarter pulses of a 6/8 feel, and there are no subdivision clicks, no accent pattern beyond the downbeat and no automatic speed trainer. The first click arrives one whole beat after you press Start, a full second of silence at 60 BPM, so count yourself in. The sound is generated by your browser's Web Audio engine, no microphone is opened and no audio leaves the tab.
Use Cases
How do you set this metronome up?
Set the tempo: drag the BPM slider anywhere from 20 to 300, or press one of the preset buttons (60, 80, 100, 120, 140, 160, 180, 200).
If you only know the tempo by ear, press Tap Tempo in time with the music instead; two taps are enough, and the gaps between your last eight taps are averaged.
Choose the beats per bar under Time Signature: 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8.
Leave Accent first beat ticked so the downbeat clicks higher than the other beats, or untick it for an even pulse.
Set the level with the volume slider between the two speaker icons.
Press Start and play along, watching the dots light up beat by beat; press Stop to finish.
Pro Tips
- Move the slider until the label under the BPM number matches the marking printed on your score: this tool shows Andante from 76, Moderato from 108, Allegro from 132 and Presto from 168.
- Tap Tempo needs at least two taps and forgets everything if you leave more than two seconds between them, so tempos below about 30 BPM cannot be tapped in; drag the slider for those.
- Tapping only sets the number. The click does not begin until you press Start, so tap the tempo first and start the metronome after.
- Changing the BPM while the metronome runs restarts the timing at once, cutting the beat in progress short, so move the slider between bars rather than on a downbeat if you are playing along.
- Untick Accent first beat when you want an even pulse with no downbeat, for example when you set 8 beats per measure and use the clicks as eighth notes against a slow tempo.
Troubleshooting
The dots light up but there is no sound.
The volume slider between the two speaker icons is at the far left, which sets the click gain to zero; drag it to the right. If it is already up, check that the browser tab is not muted and that the system output is turned on, since the click is synthesised by the tab itself.
Nothing happens for a moment after I press Start.
That is the first beat being counted. The metronome waits one full interval before its first click, which is one second at 60 BPM and half a second at 120, so treat the press as beat zero and come in on the click you hear.
Tapping does not change the BPM.
One tap on its own gives the tool nothing to measure, and a gap longer than two seconds wipes the previous taps. Tap at least twice, keeping the taps under two seconds apart; for tempos slower than about 30 BPM use the slider instead.
The tempo jumped to 300 (or 20) on its own.
Tap Tempo clamps its result to the tool's range, so a double tap or a stray fast tap reads as 300 BPM and very slow taps floor at 20. Stop tapping for two seconds and start a clean series, or set the number with the slider.
The beat slips when I change the tempo while it is running.
Moving the slider restarts the click immediately, so the beat in progress is cut short and the next click arrives at the new spacing. Change the tempo at the end of a bar, or press Stop, set the new BPM and press Start again.
Frequently Asked Questions
A metronome is a device that produces a steady, evenly spaced click at a chosen speed, measured in beats per minute. Musicians play along with it to keep an even tempo and to hear where they speed up or slow down. This one is a browser version: you set the BPM with a slider, choose how many beats each bar has, and press Start to hear the pulse.
Set a tempo at which you can play the passage without mistakes, often well below the marked speed, and press Start. Play so that each note you are counting lands with the click. When several repetitions are clean, raise the slider by about 5 BPM and repeat. The accented first beat tells you whether you are still starting the phrase on beat one.
Accurate enough to practise with, not to line up recorded tracks. Timed inside this page at 120 BPM over 63 consecutive clicks on an idle tab, the gaps averaged 500.0 milliseconds and every one of them fell between 498 and 502 ms, which is the 500 ms that tempo asks for. The clicks are scheduled with a JavaScript timer rather than the audio clock, so a busy main thread or a tab left in the background can nudge individual clicks; keep the tab in front.
A marking such as a quarter note followed by = 120 means 120 of those notes per minute, so you set 120 on the slider and count one quarter note per click. The older form M.M. = 120 means the same thing; M.M. stands for Maelzel's Metronome. When the note in the marking is a dotted quarter, as in 6/8, each click is a dotted quarter, not an eighth note.
On the scale this metronome uses, Allegro is the label from 132 BPM up to 151, and above it come Vivace from 152, Presto from 168 and Prestissimo from 200. Below it are Allegretto from 120, Moderato from 108, Andantino from 92, Andante from 76, Adagio from 66, Lento from 55, Largo from 40 and Grave from 20. Editions differ, so follow your score when it disagrees.
Press Tap Tempo in time with the music. From the second tap on, the tool measures the gaps between your taps and averages them; it keeps only your last eight taps, so at most seven gaps feed the average, and that average becomes the BPM: taps half a second apart work out to 120. Any pause longer than two seconds throws the old taps away and starts a fresh measurement, and the result is held between 20 and 300 BPM.
You can set how many beats fall in a bar: 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8. Choosing 3 gives you a 3/4 count with the accent on beat one, and 6 gives six clicks with one accent, which is how many players count 6/8 slowly. What it does not do is subdivide a beat, so for a fast 6/8 in two you set 2 beats per bar and feel three eighths inside each click yourself.
Not directly: each beat produces one tone, so there is no separate eighth- or sixteenth-note click. The workaround is to click the subdivision itself. For eighths under a quarter-note pulse of 120, drag the slider to 240 BPM, which spaces the clicks 250 ms apart, and set Time Signature to 8 so the accent still falls on the first beat of the bar. The readout then names the click rate, Prestissimo, not the notated tempo.
The mechanism came from Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel, who built a musical chronometre in Amsterdam in 1814. Johann Maelzel added a numbered scale, patented the device in 1815 and sold the pyramid-shaped metronome under his own name from 1816, which is why tempo marks in nineteenth-century scores read M.M. for Maelzel's Metronome. These dates and the M.M. reading are those given by Wikipedia's article on the metronome.
The slider stops at 300 BPM, where the clicks are 200 milliseconds apart and the label reads Prestissimo; the slowest setting is 20 BPM, three seconds between clicks. Tap Tempo is held to the same range, so very fast tapping still returns 300. If you need a faster pulse than 300, set half the tempo and count two notes to each click.