An online metronome that stays in time

How to practise with a metronome

A metronome is not a judge that catches your mistakes. It is a ruler that shows where your playing already moves. Once you stop trying to chase the click and start listening for the places where you and the click disagree, practice changes character entirely. Those places are usually predictable: the bar where your hand has to make a large jump, the downbeat of a chord change, and the moment a fast passage resolves into a long note.

That is why good practice is rarely a run-through of the whole piece. It is two or three difficult bars, isolated and worked. Ten repetitions of the problem bar will always beat ten passes through the whole piece.

Start slower than you can play

The most common mistake is starting at the target tempo. At the target tempo your hands are already rushed and you cannot hear your own errors. Find the speed at which you can pass three times in a row cleanly, and start there. If that is half your goal, so be it.

The real reason to practise slowly is not accuracy, it is observation. Slow tempos are where you finally hear the tension in your wrist, the hand that arrives late, the note that dies early. Almost every mistake that appears at speed was already there, in miniature, when you played slowly.

The five BPM rule

Pass a tempo three times without a mistake, raise it by 5 BPM. Fail, drop it by 5 and earn the three passes again. The rule has to be simple, because anything you need to think about in the middle of practice breaks the flow.

It works because each step is small enough that your body does not notice it. Jumping from 80 to 120 means relearning the motion; eight steps of five means the same motion getting slightly quicker. Twenty to twenty-five BPM in a single session is a good day, and that is enough.

Use subdivisions and accents to change difficulty

Before you raise the tempo, you can raise the information at the same tempo. Turn on eighth or sixteenth note subdivisions and the space between beats fills in, which makes your own small rushing far easier to hear. Later, do the opposite: turn subdivisions off, then mute beats 1 and 3 and leave only 2 and 4. The fewer clicks there are, the more of the timekeeping falls to you.

In the accent editor, clicking a beat cycles it through strong, weak and muted. Keeping only beats 2 and 4 in 4/4 gives you backbeat practice immediately. Setting 7/8 accents as 2+2+3 puts the shape of an odd-metre tune into your body rather than into your counting.

How tap tempo actually works

BPM means beats per minute. At 120 BPM a beat arrives every half second, so the arithmetic is trivial: measure the gap between two beats and divide sixty by it.

That is what the tap tool does, with one complication. Human hands are not metronomes, so every gap is slightly different. Rather than trusting a single interval, BeatDig keeps the last eight gaps and averages them, which is why the number settles as you keep tapping.

There is one more safeguard. A single slipped tap produces one wildly wrong gap, and a plain average would follow it. So any interval more than 40 percent away from the median of the recent ones is treated as a mistake and dropped. Eight taps is usually enough to land within a beat per minute of the real tempo.

Getting a clean reading

• Wait for the groove to settle rather than tapping over the intro.
• Tap the beat you would count with your foot, not half or double it.
• Give it at least eight taps. Four produces a number, but a rough one.
• If the reading is exactly double the real tempo, halve it. If it is half, double it.
• If the number jumps around, hit start over. Pausing for three seconds resets it anyway.

Why the beat survives a background tab

Browsers throttle timers in background tabs to save battery. A timer asked to fire twice a second may fire once. That is why most web metronomes are out of time by the time you switch back to them.

BeatDig avoids this in two layers. First, the timer that counts beats runs in a Web Worker, separate from rendering, where throttling is far milder. Second, and this matters more, the worker never makes a sound. It only wakes the page up. The clicks themselves are booked ahead of time onto the audio hardware's own clock, about 120 milliseconds in advance.

Once a click is booked, it fires at exactly that moment whether or not JavaScript is busy and whether or not the screen is drawing. A late wake-up costs nothing, because the beats it was going to schedule are still comfortably in the future. The click is synthesised in code rather than loaded from a file, so there is also nothing to download when you press start.

Reading time signatures and accents

The top number of a time signature says how many beats fill a bar; the bottom says which note value counts as one beat. 4/4 is four quarter notes, 6/8 is six eighth notes. BPM here refers to the quarter note, as it conventionally does, so choosing 6/8 automatically shortens the click spacing to eighth notes.

Accents matter as much as the signature. A march with a strong first beat and a pop song with strong second and fourth beats are both 4/4 and sound nothing alike. In compound metres such as 6/8 and 12/8 the accents usually fall every three eighths, which is what makes them feel like two or four big beats rather than six or twelve small ones.

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