Free Online Metronome
BPM 30-300, four time signatures, accent on beat 1, tap tempo, and a visual pulse so you can practice eyes-up. No signup, no download, no ads above the click.
Custom accents on beats other than 1 are .
Why practice with a metronome
A metronome is the cheapest, highest-leverage tool for any musician who wants to improve fast. It gives you an unflinching external pulse so you can hear, in real time, when your timing drifts — when a phrase rushes, when a note arrives a touch late, when the bar starts feeling wobbly under your hands. Almost every common practice problem (sloppy strumming, uneven scale runs, choppy chord changes) traces back to timing inconsistency that disappears the moment you commit to playing with a click.
The right way to use it is counter-intuitive: start far slower than feels comfortable. If a passage breaks at 80 BPM, drop to 60 — even 50 — and play it five times perfectly clean. Then nudge the tempo up by 4 to 6 BPM and play it perfectly clean again. Repeat until you reach the target tempo. This is the same loop world-class players have used for a century, and it works because the brain locks in the motor pattern only when every repetition is correct. Pushing speed past errors hard-codes the errors.
Once you trust your pulse, the metronome becomes a creativity tool. Set a backbeat accent on beats 2 and 4 to find the groove of a song. Switch on triplets to feel a shuffle. Drop the click from every other bar so you have to stay in time on your own — a technique drummers call "dropping the click" that sharpens your internal clock faster than anything else. The metronome is not a metronome anymore at that point. It is a practice partner.
Frequently asked questions
- What BPM should I practice at?
- Start at the slowest tempo where you can play every note cleanly with no mistakes. For most beginners on a new piece, that's somewhere between 50 and 70 BPM. When you can play five times in a row clean, raise the tempo by 4-6 BPM and repeat. Speed comes from accuracy, not the other way around.
- Why is the metronome silent on my phone?
- Mobile browsers block audio until you interact with the page. Press the Start button — the click should begin within a fraction of a second. If the page is muted at the OS level (silent switch on iPhone, do-not-disturb on some Android phones), the click will not be audible until you raise the volume.
- Should I use subdivisions or just quarter-note clicks?
- Quarter-note clicks build the strongest internal pulse and are right for almost all practice. Subdivisions (eighths, sixteenths, triplets) help when you need to lock a specific rhythm — funk, shuffle, polyrhythms, fast scale runs — but lean on them sparingly so your inner clock keeps developing.
- What's a smart accent?
- By default the metronome accents beat 1 of each bar so you hear where the bar starts. A smart accent lets you accent a different pattern — for example beats 2 and 4 in a backbeat feel, or just beat 3 to practice 'feeling' the and-of-three. Premium feature on Tunory.