Metronome

What this tool does

This metronome keeps steady time for music practice. Set a tempo in beats per minute, choose how many beats are in a bar, and press start: the tool plays an even click on every beat with a brighter accent on beat one. A row of dots pulses in time so you can see the beat as well as hear it, and a volume control sets the click as loud or soft as you need against your instrument.

Crucially, the timing is accurate. The clicks are scheduled ahead of time against the Web Audio API’s hardware clock rather than fired by an ordinary JavaScript timer, so the tempo does not drift — a common flaw in quick web metronomes. Whether you run it for thirty seconds or thirty minutes, the pulse stays locked.

When you would use it

Any musician practising alone reaches for a metronome. A guitarist drilling a tricky riff uses it to play the passage cleanly slow, then steadily faster. A pianist works a scale or an arpeggio against the click to even out the notes. A singer uses it to hold tempo through a phrase without rushing. Drummers and bassists — the rhythm section — practise with it constantly, because steady time is their core job. Teachers set it during lessons so a student can hear exactly where they are rushing or dragging, and ensembles use it to agree on a tempo before rehearsing a piece together.

How to use it

1. Set the tempo. Type a number in the BPM box, drag the slider, or tap the Tap tempo button in time with the music you want to match.
2. Choose the time signature — the beats-per-bar control. Pick 4/4 for most songs, 3/4 for a waltz, or another value to suit your piece.
3. Adjust the volume slider so the click sits clearly above, but not over, your instrument.
4. Press Start, or hit the Space bar. The first beat of each bar is the accented, higher click.
5. Play along, watching the pulsing dots to keep your place in the bar.
6. Press Start again, or Space, to stop.

How to practise with it

The fastest way to learn a difficult passage is to slow it down. Set the metronome well below your target tempo — slow enough that you can play every note perfectly — and loop the passage until it is clean and relaxed. Then raise the tempo by just three to five BPM and repeat. Small steps let your hands keep up; big jumps simply reintroduce the mistakes. Always practise to the accent so you stay aware of the downbeat, and resist the urge to skip ahead before a tempo feels comfortable. Progress logged this way is steady and permanent.

To find the tempo of a recording first, use the BPM tapper and copy the number here. Drummers who want subdivisions and a count-in should try the drum practice click. To check your instrument is in tune before you start, the guitar tuner and note frequency reference help. Pair the metronome with the Pomodoro timer to structure a focused practice session into timed blocks.

Privacy

The click is generated entirely inside your browser by the Web Audio API — there is no sound file to download and no recording made. The metronome does not use your microphone and never contacts a server. Your tempo, time signature and volume settings exist only in the open page and vanish when you close the tab. Nothing about your practice is tracked, logged or uploaded; the tool runs completely on your own device.