How to practice with a metronome
- Start slow enough to play it right. Your starting point is the tempo you can play without mistakes, not the target tempo. It is fine if it feels too easy.
- Speed up in small steps after a few clean runs. Raising the tempo by 2 to 5 BPM at a time gives your hands a change they can follow. The speed trainer can do this for you every few bars.
- Subdivide slow tempos. When beats are far apart, as at 60 BPM, it is easy to rush without noticing. Eighth or sixteenth subdivisions fill the gaps so the pulse stays steady.
- Hear the click on 2 and 4. For a jazz or swing feel, halve the tempo, turn off the accent and treat each click as beats two and four. Filling in the other beats yourself builds a strong internal pulse.
- Keep sessions short and frequent. Set the practice timer to 10 or 15 minutes and the metronome stops on its own, so you can focus on one passage.
Find a song’s tempo with tap tempo
Press Tap tempo or the T key along with the music. The BPM is the average of your most recent taps (up to eight), and a pause of two seconds starts a new measurement. Four or more taps give a steadier reading.
Built for steady timing
Ordinary browser timers can run tens of milliseconds late when the page is busy. Minuto schedules each click on your audio device’s clock about a tenth of a second ahead, and its timer only keeps that schedule topped up, so a busy moment on screen does not shift the beat. All sounds are synthesized in the browser, and the on-screen beat keeps moving when the sound is muted.
Tempo markings and BPM
Italian tempo markings describe a character, not an exact number, so sources give different and overlapping ranges. Below are commonly cited approximate ranges. To show a single name on screen, this metronome uses a simplified split that does not overlap.
| Marking | Meaning | Commonly cited BPM | Shown here at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Larghissimo | Extremely slow | 24 and under | 20–24 |
| Grave | Very slow and solemn | 24–40 | 25–39 |
| Largo | Slow and broad | 40–66 | 40–54 |
| Adagio | Slow, with expression | 44–66 | 55–65 |
| Andante | At a walking pace | 56–108 | 66–107 |
| Moderato | At a moderate speed | 108–120 | 108–119 |
| Allegro | Fast and bright | 120–156 | 120–155 |
| Vivace | Lively and fast | 156–176 | 156–171 |
| Presto | Very fast | 168–200 | 172–199 |
| Prestissimo | Extremely fast | 200 and over | 200–300 |
The metronome and tempo marks
Writing tempo as a number of beats per minute spread in the first half of the 19th century, after Johann Nepomuk Maelzel’s metronome. Beethoven was one of the first composers to use it: in the 1810s he published metronome marks for the eight symphonies he had written by then.