Online metronome

Thirty to three hundred beats a minute, with an accented first beat and as many beats in the bar as you need. Tap the tempo if you would rather feel it than pick a number, and use the space bar to start and stop without reaching for the mouse.

It makes sound and nothing else: no microphone, no account, no server. The clicks are scheduled against your browser's audio clock rather than on an ordinary timer, which is what keeps them from drifting. The only things kept between visits are the tempo and the beats per bar, stored in this browser.

Practising with it

The useful trick is not playing along at the tempo you want. It is finding the tempo at which the passage is genuinely clean, staying there until it is dull, and then moving up in small steps. A metronome is most valuable in the bars you would rather hurry past, which is exactly where it is least welcome.

The accent on the first beat is doing more work than the tempo. It keeps you in the bar rather than merely in time, which is what stops a dropped beat from going unnoticed.

The metronome in the app

Scoreflection has one built into the score viewer, in the control rail next to the tempo readout, so it clicks at the tempo the piece is set to rather than at a speed of its own, with a separate switch for the bell on the first beat of the bar.

That is the part a browser page cannot do: the app is reading the same score you are, so it knows where the bar lines are, follows you through repeats, and marks the notes you played against the ones written. Reading scores, playback, the metronome and the tuner are free and need no account; being listened to and graded is the paid Practice plan, which needs you to be signed in.

Need to tune first? There is an online tuner here too.