Online metronome · Free · No sign-up
Slow, even and easy to count: at 60 BPM every beat lands exactly one second apart. It is the tempo teachers reach for when a passage needs taking apart, and the one to start from when you are building a fast part up from nothing.
Beats per minute
60
Press Space to start and stop · ↑ ↓ to nudge off 60 · or
The tempo
Sixty is the only tempo you can check against a clock. Each beat is one full second, a bar of 4/4 is four seconds, and a three-minute piece runs to 45 bars. That makes it the natural floor for practice: slow enough that there is room to think between notes, and slow enough that any unevenness in your playing is impossible to hide.
Where you hear it
Double it and you land on 120 BPM, which is how a lot of this material is actually written. Same pulse, twice the counting.
Wondering whether a particular track is 60 BPM? Tap along with it and compare, or let the MagicBPM app listen and tell you.
Practice note: If a run keeps collapsing at speed, park it at 60 until it is clean, then climb in steps of four. The jump from 60 to 120 feels enormous, but it is only fifteen steps.
Presets
Every one opens the metronome already running at that BPM.
Need something in between? The full metronome covers 40 to 220 BPM.
MagicBPM for iPhone and Android
The app pairs the same metronome with a real-time BPM detector that hears the music around you, so you can lift a tempo off a track and practice to it straight away.
Good to know
One beat every second, exactly, the same tick as a clock’s second hand. A beat lands every 1.000 seconds, so one bar of 4/4 lasts 4.000 seconds and a three-minute song runs to about 45 bars. Press Play above to hear it.
60 BPM is slow. It sits at the bottom of Largo, the slowest of the standard tempo markings, and is half the speed of the 120 BPM most pop music lives at.
Practising a difficult passage before working the tempo back up; Slow ballads, sacred and choral music, and funeral marches; Breathing, meditation and paced-breathing exercises. The list is a guide rather than a rule: tempo varies within every genre.
Counted at double speed, 60 BPM is 120 BPM, which is how the same pulse is often written. Both readings describe the same music, which is why two people, or two apps, can give different answers for one song and both be right.
This page opens already set to 60 BPM, so press Play or hit the spacebar. To move off it, drag the slider, type a number into the BPM box, or use the arrow keys to nudge a beat at a time.
Measuring instead of setting? Use the tap tempo tool to find a song’s BPM.
