Unlimited metronome and speed trainer

Why this metronome has no 200 BPM ceiling

Most online metronomes stop somewhere between 200 and 250 BPM. For a lot of music that is fine. For a guitarist working on speed it is exactly where the interesting part begins. Alternate picking in sixteenths at 200 BPM is 13.3 notes per second; at 240 BPM it is 16. Tremolo picking on one string, the palm-muted eighth-note riffs of thrash and death metal at 220 to 260 BPM, sweep arpeggios in sextuplets: all of it lives above the cap.

The ceiling hurts even more in meters based on the eighth note. BPM always refers to the beat unit of the time signature, the note in the denominator. In 7/8 at 240 BPM the click is an eighth note, so a riff that feels only moderately fast already asks for a number a capped metronome cannot show.

The usual workarounds are to halve the tempo and double the subdivision, or to count in half-time. Both wreck a speed-trainer session. If you set 120 with sixteenths instead of 240 with eighths, a +1 BPM step becomes a +2 step at the real tempo, “every 4 bars” quietly becomes every 8 real bars, and the accents land on every other downbeat. In 7/8 you cannot halve at all, because 3.5 beats is not a bar. Here the tempo range is 1 to 1000 BPM, the click is the note you asked for, and it stays stable at the top of the range, so the metronome behaves exactly the same at 300 BPM as it does at 100.

How to use the speed trainer

The speed trainer raises or lowers the tempo for you, always on a bar line, never in the middle of a bar. Here is a complete run from 220 to 240 BPM, the classic “last twenty” for a fast picking line.

1. Set the time signature and subdivision first, for example 4/4 with sixteenths, so the grid you hear is the grid you play. The trainer keeps them for the whole run.
2. Set the start tempo to 220 and the target to 240. The direction is ascending.
3. Set the step to 1 BPM. Steps go from 1 to 100.
4. Choose when the tempo changes: every 4 bars. You can also change every N seconds, but even then the change waits for the next bar line, so a stage never ends mid-phrase.
5. Add a count-in of one bar (0 to 8 are available). The count-in runs at the start tempo and gives you time to get your hands in position.
6. Press Space. After the count-in you get four bars at 220. On the bar line that ends the fourth bar, the tempo becomes 221 and a short chime marks the change. The chime is your cue to keep going without looking at the screen.
7. 220 to 240 in +1 steps is 21 stages of 4 bars, 84 bars plus the count-in. A bar of 4/4 at 220 BPM lasts about 1.09 seconds, so the whole run takes roughly a minute and a half.
8. Space pauses and resumes without losing the stage. S stops. The bracket keys [ and ] jump to the previous or next stage when one tempo needs more work or is already easy. Restart takes you back to the count-in.
9. Decide what happens at the target: stop, keep playing at 240, or loop the run. Switch on “Go back down to the start after the target” and the trainer comes back down to 220 after reaching 240, which turns one run into a warm-up and cool-down.

Choosing the step

Use +1 for the last 10 percent below your goal, where every beat per minute is felt. Use +2 in the range below that and +5 for warm-ups, where you are not learning anything new but getting the blood into your hands. The built-in presets follow the same logic: Warm-up runs 80 to 120 in +5 steps every 8 bars and keeps playing at 120, Alternate picking runs 160 to 200 in +2 steps every 4 bars, and High-speed guitar runs 220 to 240 in +1 steps every 4 bars. Save your own presets for the lines you are working on; you can rename, duplicate and delete them, and they are kept in your browser. The speed trainer page explains every trainer setting in more detail.

Practising above 200 BPM

High tempo is a different kind of work. The stages should be shorter, two to four bars rather than eight, because at 230 BPM four bars of sixteenths are 64 pick strokes in just over four seconds and fatigue arrives fast. The tempo changes on the bar line, so short stages do not cost you the flow.

Follow the clean-speed rule: the highest tempo you are allowed to use is the highest tempo at which every note is still separate. The moment two notes blur into one, you are rehearsing the blur. Drop 5 BPM, or press [ to return to the previous stage, and stay there.

Use subdivision muting as a test. Play sixteenths against a click with the sixteenth subdivision on, then mute the subdivision clicks and play the same passage against quarter notes only. If your notes still fall between the clicks evenly, the speed is yours. If they drift, the subdivision was carrying you.

Finish a high-tempo block with a descending run: 240 down to 220 in −2 steps every 4 bars is 11 stages and 44 bars, under a minute, and lets the hands relax while you are still playing accurately. On a day when the speed is there, use the Endurance preset instead, one tempo held for five minutes, to find out whether a tempo you can hit for four bars is one you can hold for a song.

Hearing the click at extreme tempos

At 300 BPM the clicks are 200 milliseconds apart, so the app shortens each click to keep them from smearing into one another. Try all three click sounds (classic, wood, digital) at that speed; which one cuts through a distorted guitar best depends on your amp and your ears. In a 4/4 context, though, a click at 300 BPM is often more useful set as 150 BPM with eighth-note subdivisions: the accented downbeat and the four beat clicks give your ear a pulse to hold on to, and the subdivision fills in between, instead of 300 identical clicks a minute. That trick does not apply to x/8 meters. In 7/8 the eighth is the beat, seven does not divide by two, and the grouping accents need to fall on the right eighths, so there you keep the real tempo and let the accents do the work.

Odd time signatures and grouping

The same tool handles odd meters. Presets cover 5/4, 7/4, 7/8, 9/8 and 11/8, and any signature from 1 to 32 beats over 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 works. Two settings make odd meters usable rather than merely available: grouping and per-beat muting.

Grouping is how a bar is felt. Seven eighths are almost never counted as seven equal beats; they are two twos and a three, or a three and two twos, or a two, a three and a two. Set 7/8 to 2+2+3, 3+2+2 or 2+3+2 and the metronome accents the first beat of each group, so you hear “ONE two ONE two ONE two three” instead of a flat row of seven. 9/8 as 3+3+3 gives you the compound feel of a jig or a slow shuffle; 9/8 as 2+2+2+3 gives you the Balkan version. Every beat can still be changed by hand afterwards, so a 3+3+3 with an extra accent on the last eighth is one tap away.

The beat unit distinction matters when you read a chart. A 7/4 metronome at 200 clicks quarter notes, so eighths run at 400 per minute. 7/8 at 200 clicks eighths; the quarter-note equivalent is 100. When a chart says “quarter = 100” in 7/8, you set 200. Muting individual beats lets you drop the click on beats you tend to rush, or leave only the group accents playing and fill the rest yourself. The odd time signature page goes deeper into grouping and counting for each preset.

Guitar practice tips

A metronome only helps your guitar practice if the routine around it is honest.

• Record yourself once a week at your current top tempo. The phone microphone hears the missed notes your hands hide from you.
• Use the three-of-five rule: play the passage five times at one tempo and move up only when three of them are clean. With the trainer, that means a stage of about five repetitions of the phrase.
• Keep a tempo journal. Session history stores the last 50 sessions longer than 10 seconds with their duration, bar count and BPM range, so you can see whether last Tuesday’s 232 was a good day or the new normal.
• Alternate weeks. One week of pushing tempo, one week of playing 15 percent below your top speed and cleaning up tone, muting and dynamics. Speed built on a dirty week does not last.
• Put the click on beats 2 and 4 by muting beats 1 and 3. This is how the pulse works in most rock, funk and jazz, and it exposes whether you are leading the beat or leaning on it.
• Practise subdivisions on purpose: eighths, triplets and sixteenths against a quarter-note click, then the same phrase with the subdivision click muted so you supply the grid.

The guitar practice page builds these into routines for picking, riffs and solos.

Free, private and offline

The metronome is free. There is no account, no sign-up and no cookie banner, because the app sets no cookies. Settings, saved presets and session history stay in your browser’s local storage and never leave the device. Install the app from the browser menu if you want it on the home screen; after the first visit it works offline, and the clicks are synthesised on your device, so nothing is downloaded during practice.

A share link encodes the tempo, time signature, accents, grouping, subdivision and trainer settings in the URL and nothing else. Send it to a student or a bandmate and they open the same setup, without either of you giving up any personal data.

Frequently asked questions

Does it really go above 200 BPM?

Yes. The tempo range is 1 to 1000 BPM, and the click stays stable across the whole range. You can run a speed trainer from 220 to 240 in +1 steps without halving the tempo or doubling subdivisions.

Is the timing accurate?

The clicks are scheduled with the Web Audio API on the audio clock, a short time ahead of when they play, so a busy page or a slow frame cannot push them late. A plain JavaScript timer can be late by tens of milliseconds, and far more in a background tab; this approach does not have that problem.

Why did the first start need a tap?

Browsers block sound until the visitor interacts with the page, to stop sites from auto-playing audio. The first tap or key press unlocks the audio engine; after that, Space starts and pauses as expected.

Does it work with the screen off?

It depends on the browser. On desktop and Android the metronome keeps running in a background tab, and it asks the system to keep the screen awake where the browser supports it (Firefox does not). iOS pauses web audio when the screen locks or another app takes over sound, so on an iPhone keep the screen on.

Can I use it offline?

Yes. After the first visit the app is cached and can be installed from the browser menu. It then opens and plays without an internet connection, and no sounds are downloaded during practice because the clicks are generated locally.

Where is my data stored?

Everything, including settings, your presets and the session history, lives in your browser’s local storage on your device. There is no account and nothing is sent to a server. Clearing site data in the browser removes it.

Can I share my settings?

Yes. The share link puts the tempo, time signature, accents, grouping, subdivision and speed trainer settings into the URL. Whoever opens it gets the same setup; the link carries no personal data.

Is 7/8 at 200 BPM the same speed as 7/4 at 200 BPM?

The clicks arrive at the same rate and a bar lasts 2.1 seconds in both cases, but in 7/4 the click is a quarter note and in 7/8 it is an eighth. That changes what the written notes mean: eighths in 7/4 at 200 run at 400 per minute, while in 7/8 at 200 the eighths are the clicks themselves.