This is a free online metronome, built for guitar practice rather than for a metronome's own sake. Set the tempo anywhere from 20 to 400 BPM, pick a time signature, decide what each beat is divided into, and choose which beats carry an accent. Then take the click away and see whether the pulse was yours or the machine's. No account, no download. It sits alongside the rest of our free guitar tools.
Beyond the click: subdivisions and accents
One click per beat is where everyone starts, and it is enough to find out that a passage is too fast. It is rarely enough to fix it, because most rhythm problems live between the beats. Two settings deal with that.
Rhythm figures
The figure menu decides what you hear between two beats. A plain quarter note, two eighths, a triplet, four sixteenths, a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth, a swing shuffle pair, a sextuplet, or a clave pattern, 3-2 or 2-3. The clave patterns come with a slider that rotates the figure by whole eighth notes, so you can start it anywhere in the bar.
Time signatures run 4/4, 3/4, 2/4, 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8. Changing one rebuilds the row of beats under the display, and the accent switches with it.
Custom accents
There is one switch per beat of the bar, and beat one is on when you arrive. Turn it off and switch on beats two and four instead: now the metronome marks the backbeat, which is where a guitar part usually sits. In 6/8 or 12/8, accenting the first and fourth eighth note is what turns a stream of clicks into a groove you can play to.
An accented beat is louder and carries a second layer of sound, so it reads clearly even at a low volume, and its dot changes color at the same time.
The click itself can change too. The sound menu runs from a plain electronic click to a woodblock, a triangle, a güiro, a cowbell, a closed hi-hat and three drum sounds. This matters more than it sounds like it should: a click that cuts through your guitar is a click you stop fighting and start playing with.
Visual metronome, for loud rooms and silent practice
The row of dots under the tempo lights up on each beat, and the counter beside it tells you which bar you are in. That display runs whether the sound is on or off, which is what makes this a visual metronome as well as an audible one. The Visual mode button turns the click off and leaves the dots on their own.
When the room is loud
A rehearsal with a drummer, an amp at playing volume, a room with other people in it. A click loses that fight, and turning it up only makes it harsher. Put the phone or the laptop where you can see it and follow the dots instead.
When you cannot make noise
Late evening, thin walls, somebody asleep in the next room. Mute the click, keep the beat in your eyes, and practice anyway. A flashing beat is also a harder test than a click: your ear cannot ride along with it, so the pulse has to be yours.
Tempo ramps and mute bars: train your inner clock
A metronome holds a tempo. The useful part is choosing which tempo, letting it move while you play, and then taking the click away. Start below the real speed: work a difficult bar 10 to 20 BPM under tempo until it is clean, then climb back in small steps. A passage that falls apart at full speed is almost never a speed problem. It is an accuracy problem that speed exposes.
Let the tempo move on its own
Four play modes change the tempo for you, one step at a time, at the start of a bar. Crescendo and Decrescendo add or remove a few BPM every few seconds, with the interval and the step you set, and stop at the limits of the tool. Steps hold a tempo for a while, then jump, up or down. Oscillation walks between a low and a high tempo and back, for as long as you play.
The Subdivision pyramid leaves the tempo alone and changes the figure instead: quarter notes, then eighths, triplets, sixteenths, and back down, so your hand has to follow the same beat at four densities. Press Stop and everything returns to where it started.
Mute a share of the clicks
Pick Random mute in the play mode menu and set a percentage. That share of the clicks then drops out at random, while the ones that remain land exactly where they always would. At a low setting you barely notice. Around half, you find out whether you were keeping time or being carried.
A progressive variant sits next to it in the same menu, starting from a percentage you choose. Either way, the moment you hear a click arrive early or late against your playing is the moment the exercise has done its work.
Chain tempo changes by the bar
Choose Program in the play mode menu and write one block per line,
then apply them. The format is plain: bars:4 tempo:90 runs
four bars at 90 BPM, bars:8 sig:3/4 gives you eight bars in
3/4, and bars:12 tempo:110 sig:6/8 figure:eighth changes tempo,
signature and subdivision at once.
The metronome counts the bars and moves to the next block on its own, so a tempo ramp is a few lines of text: 90, then 100, then 110, each for as long as you need. It is also how you rehearse a song that changes meter without reaching for anything mid-performance.
When to raise the tempo
There is no universal starting tempo, and a percentage of the original is a poor substitute for one. Look instead for the speed at which you can play the passage with no tension, a clean sound, and no stroke arriving early or late. That is your starting tempo, whatever number it happens to be. Then raise it by one small step and check the same three things again. If only one bar is failing, isolate that bar rather than slowing the whole piece down indefinitely.
One small step means a few BPM, not ten. The Crescendo play mode will do it for you with the interval and the step you set, which has the advantage of removing the decision: you keep playing, the tempo moves underneath you, and you find out where it stops working rather than deciding in advance.
Two signs tell you the step was too big. The first is tension, anywhere from the forearm to the jaw. The second is a stroke that starts arriving with the click instead of on the beat, which sounds like an improvement and is the opposite: you have begun following the machine. Drop back to the last tempo that held, play four bars there, and climb again.
If the hand is the limit rather than the tempo, the problem is probably in the pattern itself. Our eight guitar strumming patterns are ordered so that each adds exactly one thing to the one before, which is the cheapest way to find out which thing you are missing. And if what you really want to know is whether you are moving at a normal pace, how long it takes to learn guitar gives the milestones as ranges rather than dates.
Tempo markings: from Largo to Presto in BPM
Printed music often gives the tempo as an Italian word rather than a number. These are the usual zones. The edges overlap on purpose, because the words describe a character as much as a speed.
| Marking | BPM zone | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Grave | 25 to 45 BPM | Very slow, solemn |
| Largo | 40 to 60 BPM | Broad and spacious |
| Adagio | 66 to 76 BPM | Slow, expressive |
| Andante | 76 to 108 BPM | Walking pace |
| Moderato | 108 to 120 BPM | Moderate |
| Allegro | 120 to 168 BPM | Fast, cheerful |
| Vivace | 168 to 176 BPM | Lively |
| Presto | 168 to 200 BPM | Very fast |
| Prestissimo | 200 BPM and up | As fast as it goes |
Two of them are worth a second look. Andante is the widest zone on the list and the one most often played too fast: it means walking pace, and most people walk slower than they think. And Presto and Vivace overlap, because the difference between them is energy rather than speed.
Tap tempo
The Tap Tempo button is built in, and the T key does the same thing. Tap along with whatever you are listening to and the tempo field follows your taps, averaged rather than measured from a single gap. It is the quickest way to get this metronome onto the tempo of a song that is already playing.
If what you actually want is to find a song's BPM and write it down, our tap tempo page is built for that job. It shows the number of taps behind the average, lets you set how many taps the average runs over, and converts the tempo into milliseconds for a delay pedal. Find the figure there, then bring it back here to practice with it.
Keyboard shortcuts
On a computer, the keyboard is steadier than the mouse, and it keeps your eyes on the guitar.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
Space | Start or stop the metronome. |
T | Tap the tempo, exactly like the Tap Tempo button. |
Enter | Taps the tempo as well, if that key suits you better. |
+ | One BPM faster, up to 400. |
- | One BPM slower, down to 20. |
Two details worth knowing. Shortcuts are ignored while you are typing in a field, so you can enter a tempo or write a program without the click starting under your hands. And holding a key down does nothing extra: a held key would fire dozens of taps a second and produce a nonsense tempo, so only real presses count.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work on a phone?
Why use subdivisions instead of a plain click?
What is a visual metronome for?
How do the mute modes help?
Why not just use the metronome in the search results?
Is it really free?
Who made this
Guitar Social Club is the work of Yohann Abbou, a guitar teacher in Paris. He teaches adults, which shapes everything here: people with jobs, limited practice time and a clear idea of the songs they want to play. The tools come out of his lessons, which is why none of them asks you to sign up before it works, and why this one would rather hand you an accent switch than one more click. The rest of our free guitar tools work the same way, and the online guitar tuner is the one to use before this one. Tune first, set the tempo second. There is more on who he is and why this site exists in about Guitar Social Club.