Online metronome
Set it, tap it, or count an odd bar.
A metronome with nothing to install and nothing to buy. Turn the dial or tap the tempo, choose how many beats are in a bar, and press play. It keeps time on the audio clock rather than a browser timer, so it stays exact over a long practice session — and it will happily count 5/4, 7/8 or anything else you ask for.
Space starts and stops · T taps the tempo · click a numbered lamp to make that beat accented, normal or silent — a silent beat is the one you have to keep time through yourself.
How to use it
- Don't know the tempo? Tap the TAP TEMPO button (or the T key) in time with the music. Four taps is enough; it averages them, so one sloppy tap won't throw it.
- Odd time signature? Set beats per bar to 5, 7 or 12. The first beat is accented by default so you can always hear where the bar starts.
- Practising a groove? Turn on eighths, triplets or sixteenths to hear the subdivision you're actually playing against.
- Testing yourself? Click a numbered lamp until it goes dashed and that beat falls silent. Keeping time through the hole is far harder — and far more useful — than playing along with a click on every beat.
What tempo should I practise at?
Slower than you think. The point of a metronome is to find the speed at which you can play something cleanly, then move up in small steps — five BPM at a time is plenty. If you are making mistakes, the tempo is too high, no matter what the score says. These are the traditional markings the dial names as you turn it:
- Largo (40–60) — broad and slow. Where difficult passages get learned.
- Adagio (66–76) — at ease.
- Andante (76–108) — walking pace.
- Moderato (108–120) — moderate; most pop music lives near here.
- Allegro (120–156) — fast and bright. House and techno sit at 120–130.
- Vivace (156–176) and Presto (176–200) — lively, then very fast. Drum & bass is usually counted at half of its 170-ish BPM.
Why a browser metronome can be trusted
Because it isn't drawn by the same clock that draws the page. Web pages measure time with timers that drift by milliseconds whenever the browser is busy, which is exactly the error you would hear as a wobble. Instead, every click here is placed on the Web Audio clock — sample-accurate, scheduled ahead of time, and unaffected by what the rest of the page is doing. The lamps can stutter on a slow machine; the sound cannot.
When you're done counting
A metronome keeps time, but it doesn't make music. When you want a beat instead of a click, the drum grid builds one step by step at the same tempo, and the Studio puts every instrument on one shared clock. If what you actually need is a note to tune to, that's the tuner.