How to use a metronome for practice
A metronome helps most when you use it slowly. Start a new piece or exercise at a tempo where every note is clean, even if that feels far too slow, and only speed up once you can play it right three times in a row.
- Find the target tempo on the music or tap it from a recording with the BPM Tapper.
- Start at about 60–70% of that speed and play along until it feels easy.
- Raise the tempo by 2 to 5 BPM, or let the speed trainer do it every 4 or 8 bars.
- When mistakes start, go back 10 BPM and build up again. Progress over days, not minutes.
- Finish with the gap trainer: play 2 bars with the click and 2 without, and see if you land back on the beat.
For pianists, guitarists and drummers alike, listening for the click to disappear under your own playing is the sign you are exactly in time.
Common tempos: 60, 80, 100 and 120 BPM
Some tempos come up again and again. The Popular tempos buttons above set them in one tap, and you can link straight to one, such as a 60 BPM metronome for slow scales.
- 60 BPM: one click per second. Slow practice, ballads, and a common starting point for scales and new pieces.
- 70–80 BPM: slow pop, hip-hop and reggae grooves; a comfortable speed for learning chord changes.
- 90–100 BPM: mid-tempo pop, funk and many rock songs.
- 120 BPM: two clicks per second. The classic tempo of marches, disco, house and much pop music.
- 140–180 BPM: fast rock, trance, punk and drum and bass. Practise these with subdivisions off first.
Time signatures: 4/4, 3/4, 6/8 and odd meters
The top number of a time signature is the number of beats in a bar, and the bottom number is the note that gets one beat: 4 for a quarter note, 8 for an eighth note. The metronome accents the first beat so you always know where the bar starts.
- 4/4 (common time): four beats, with a lighter accent on beat 3. Most pop, rock and jazz.
- 3/4: three beats, the waltz and many hymns and folk songs.
- 2/4: two beats, marches and polkas.
- 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8: beats grouped in threes, accented on 1 and 4 (and 7, 10). Jigs, ballads and slow blues shuffles.
- 5/4 and 7/8: odd meters. Tap the beats to set your own grouping, such as 3+2 or 2+2+3.
Need a meter that isn’t listed? Use the −/+ buttons next to Beats per bar to set anything from 1 to 16 beats.
Accents, muted beats and the drum sound
Every beat light is a button. Tap it to cycle through accent (tallest), secondary accent, normal and muted. Muting beats 1 and 3 of a 4/4 bar leaves a click only on 2 and 4, the backbeat jazz and funk players use to feel swing. Muting all but beat 1 turns the metronome into a once-a-bar pulse for advanced practice.
The drum kit sound plays a kick on the first beat, a snare on accents and a hi-hat on the rest, which feels more like playing with a drummer than a plain click. Woodblock and cowbell cut through loud instruments; Beep is clearest through headphones.
Why an online metronome can drift, and how this one stays steady
Simple web metronomes use page timers, which browsers slow down in background tabs or when the device is busy, so the beat stumbles. This metronome schedules each click on the audio clock a fraction of a second ahead, driven by a separate worker, so the timing stays sample-accurate even when you switch tabs or open your sheet music in another window. The beat lights follow the audio, not the other way round.