The Best Metronome for Piano Practice: Which One to Buy (and Why)

Lesson 3 of 21 in the free Rhythm for Adult Piano Beginners series. Prefer to watch in order? Open the full playlist on YouTube.

The best metronome for piano practice is the one you will actually use, and that is a more useful answer than it sounds, because the three kinds of metronome fail in three different ways. In this lesson I compare all three: the traditional pendulum, the electronic unit that sits on your music stand, and the app on your phone. I tell you which one I personally practice with, and the one feature worth insisting on before you spend anything.

Buying the metronome is the easy part. Knowing what to do with it is where most adults go wrong, so the second half of this post is about that.

The problem: a metronome you resent is a metronome you do not use

A metronome is a device that keeps a consistent tempo while you practice. It produces a steady beat, usually a series of clicks, ticks or beeps, that helps you stay in time. The metronome as we know it came into existence in 1815, when Johann Maelzel, a German inventor, patented his design, though the idea of a device to measure tempo is older than that. Beethoven was one of the first composers to embrace it, and he included specific tempo markings in his works. There are still debates about how accurate those early machines were, which I find comforting.

Here is the modern problem. Most adults buy whichever metronome shows up first, discover it is too loud, too quiet, too fiddly or too far from the piano, and quietly stop using it. Then the piece speeds up in the easy bars and drags in the hard ones, and the rhythm never gets the steady reference it needs. The metronome did not fail. The fit did.

So the question is not which metronome is objectively best. It is which one you will turn on every single day, and that depends on how you practice and where your phone is when you sit down.

How I teach it: the three types, and the one feature to insist on

Mechanical: the pendulum metronome

This is the traditional one. You wind it up and a weighted pendulum swings, clicking on each beat. It is beautiful, it needs no batteries, and most students are very curious about how fast it goes. Mine is a Wittner, considered the gold standard of pendulum metronomes, and it was a gift from one of my students. What it lacks is functionality: there is no volume control, no subdivision, no headphone jack. If you love the object and you practice on an acoustic piano in a quiet room, it is a lovely choice. If you need flexibility, it is not.

Electronic: the one for your music stand

The electronic metronome is battery powered, it has a flashing light synced with the beat, and it sits right on your music stand as a dedicated device, which matters more than it sounds: a metronome that lives on the piano gets used. The one I have is the Seiko SQ60. It has a pleasant click, a volume adjustment, a second tone option and a headphone jack, and it seems well made. If you go this route, insist on one thing: a volume knob. A metronome you cannot turn down becomes unbearable within a week.

Digital: the metronome app I use

Of the three, this is the one I personally use most: an app called Pro Metronome. It flashes the beat, it has a dial to change tempo, and the paid upgrade, which costs a few dollars, lets you hear subdivisions. If you are practicing eighth notes or sixteenth notes, hearing the subdivision click is enormously helpful. It connects over Bluetooth, and because it is on my phone, it is with me wherever I go. The trade-off is the phone itself: if your phone is a distraction, keep the dedicated unit on the stand.

Where to start if you are new

If you have nothing yet and want the best metronome for piano practice without overthinking it, start with the app. It is free to try, it has subdivisions, and it removes every excuse. If you find yourself reaching for your phone and not the metronome, buy the SQ60 and leave it on the piano. Keep the pendulum for the day you want to treat yourself. Whatever you choose, this is something you want nearby every time you practice. It is not just for beginners: advanced pianists use a metronome to even out their playing, to bring a piece up to tempo, and to perfect the rhythm of difficult passages.

The three products from the video, plain links, no affiliate arrangement: the Wittner pendulum metronome, the Seiko SQ60 electronic metronome, and the Pro Metronome app (also on Google Play).

Try this today: three ways to use whichever one you bought

1. Find your honest tempo. Take one bar you can play cleanly. Start the metronome at 60 and play the bar four times. If any repetition was not clean, go down to 54. Keep going down until four in a row are clean. That number, not the one you wish it were, is your practice tempo for that bar today.

2. Count out loud with the click. Set the metronome to 60 and count one, two, three, four with it for a full minute without playing. Then count one and two and three and four and, two syllables per click. If your app has subdivisions, turn them on and listen to how your ands line up. This is the fastest way I know to make a metronome feel like a partner instead of a judge.

3. Build tempo in steps of four. Once a passage is clean at your honest tempo, move the metronome up by four beats per minute, not twenty. Clean at 60, then 64, then 68. The steps feel too small. That is why they work.

What 100 days of this looks like

Here is the arc I usually see when an adult does this every day. Your pace will be your own.

In the first week, the metronome feels like it is always wrong: too fast in the hard bars, too slow in the easy ones. That feeling is accurate information about your playing, not about the metronome. By the end of the second week you have an honest tempo for every piece you are working on, and you stop pretending.

By the second month, the four-beats-per-minute ladder is a habit. Pieces that used to collapse at speed get there gradually and stay there, because every step up was earned. Around day 100, you catch yourself turning the metronome on before you even open the music, and when you play without it, there is a steady click in your head doing the same job. That internal click is what everyone actually wants when they ask which metronome to buy. The device is how you grow it.

Previous lesson: How to Practice Rhythm on Piano: The 3-Step Method I Use With Every Adult. Start from the beginning: What Is Rhythm in Music? Piano Basics for Adult Beginners. Next lesson: Quarter, Eighth and Sixteenth Notes Explained for Adult Piano Beginners. Follow the playlist so you do not miss it.