60 BPM Metronome
← All toolsAt 60 BPM a beat is one second, exactly, which makes this the one tempo on the dial you can check against a clock rather than against another metronome. It is also the border post between largo and larghetto, and slow enough that the hard part is no longer playing the notes — it is arriving on the beat rather than somewhere in the neighbourhood of it. The metronome below is already set to 60; press Start.
Subdivision and swing
Subdivision clicks are quieter and higher than the beat, so the pulse stays the loudest thing in the bar. Swing applies to eighths and triplets only, and pushes the offbeat of each pair later — 33% lands it on the triplet grid, 50% on a dotted eighth. The downbeat never moves.
Tempo trainer
Trainer off — the tempo stays exactly where you put it.
How to practise at 60 BPM
- Press Start. The pendulum takes one second to cross and one to come back, so a full swing is a bar of 2/4 and two full swings are a bar of 4/4.
- Turn on eighth notes before you decide the click is too slow to be useful. A second is a long time to hold a pulse in your head, and the drift you cannot hear against a bare 60 is obvious against 120 clicks a minute.
- For tone work — long bows, sustained singing, held wind notes — set beats per bar to 4 and give each note a whole bar. That is four seconds a note, which is long enough for intonation to sag audibly if it is going to.
- For rhythm work, keep the accent on and count out loud. At this tempo counting aloud is what stops you rushing the second half of every bar.
What 60 BPM is genuinely useful for
Slow tempos are not just fast ones with more room. They test something different. At 60 BPM there is a full second of silence between clicks, and human timekeeping is far worse over that gap than most players expect — the internal pulse wanders, and only the click coming back tells you it did. That is exactly why it is the right speed for the work where accuracy is not about speed at all.
Intonation is the obvious one. A wind player holding four-second notes, a string player drawing a full bow to a four-beat bar, a singer sustaining a vowel: all of them are being asked to keep a pitch steady for longer than a fast tempo ever demands, and 60 BPM gives a bar exactly four seconds long to measure it against. Run this alongside a reference pitch and you have the whole exercise — a drone to sit against and a bar to hold it for.
The second use is diagnostic. Play a passage you think you know at 60 with sixteenths clicking underneath, and every note that was arriving slightly early or late at speed becomes impossible to hide. Most players find their sixteenth-note runs are not even; they are two fast notes and two slow ones, and only a slow tempo with a dense subdivision shows it.
Largo, lento and larghetto all meet at 60
Three Italian words claim this number. Largo runs 40 to 60, lento 45 to 60, and larghetto starts at 60 — so 60 BPM is simultaneously the fastest largo, the fastest lento, and the slowest larghetto. That is not sloppiness in the reference tables. Largo means broad, not slow; lento means slow. A largo is meant to sound spacious and unhurried, and a piece can be broad at 56 and merely slow at 56 depending on what it is doing.
Chopin's Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4, is marked Largo, and its left hand is a chain of repeated chords that change by one note at a time — the marking is telling you how to weigh them, not only how far apart to put them. Satie headed the first Gymnopedie Lent et douloureux, slow and sorrowful, which is the same instruction given in French and with the character stated outright.
Larghetto, meanwhile, is a diminutive: a little largo, which by convention means slightly quicker than one. The -etto ending does the same job in adagietto and allegretto further up the scale.
What 60 BPM works out to
Every number below follows from one division: sixty seconds over 60 beats. It is worth knowing the sixteenth-note figure before you decide a passage is playable — that is the rate your hands actually have to move at, not the tempo on the page.
| Note value | Per minute | One lasts |
|---|---|---|
| Quarter note — the beat | 60 | 1000 ms |
| Eighth note | 120 | 500 ms |
| Eighth-note triplet | 180 | 333 ms |
| Sixteenth note | 240 | 250 ms |
| Bar of 4/4 | 15 | 4000 ms |
Two tempos on this site are one arithmetic step away: 120 BPM is twice this. Practising a passage at the slower one and hearing it at the faster one is the same notes at the same subdivision, counted differently.
Where 60 BPM falls in the Italian markings
60 BPM is covered by 3 words at once: Largo, Lento and Larghetto. Overlap is normal and is not a defect of the system: these words were in use for a century and a half before Maelzel's metronome existed, and they describe a character — how the music carries itself — with speed as a consequence. The bands below are the ones the standard reference tables give.
| Marking | Sense | BPM | Tempo pages in this band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grave | slow and solemn | 25–45 | — |
| Largo | broadly | 40–60 | 60 |
| Lento | slowly | 45–60 | 60 |
| Larghetto | rather broadly | 60–66 | 60 |
| Adagio | slowly, with ease | 66–76 | 70 |
FAQ
- Is 60 BPM the same as one beat per second?
- Yes, exactly, and it is the only round tempo where the arithmetic is that clean. Sixty beats in sixty seconds is one per second, so a bar of 4/4 is four seconds and a bar of 3/4 is three. If you ever want to check that a metronome is honest, 60 BPM against a clock's second hand is the test that needs no equipment.
- Why do I drift at 60 BPM when I have no trouble at 120?
- Because you are being asked to hold the pulse for twice as long without help. Timekeeping error grows with the gap you have to bridge, and a second is a long gap. This is the argument for subdivisions: switch the metronome to eighths and you are bridging half a second at a time, with the beat still accented so you never lose which one is which. If eighths feel easy, sixteenths at 60 are 240 clicks a minute and leave nowhere to hide.
- What is the difference between largo and lento?
- Character. Both cover roughly the same numbers, but largo means broad and lento means slow. A largo asks for weight and space in each note; a lento just asks you not to hurry. In practice the composer's other instructions — the dynamics, the articulation, whether the line is one long phrase or a series of separate events — tell you which reading is wanted more reliably than the word alone does.
- Can I use a 60 BPM click for a piece in 6/8?
- Yes, but decide what the 60 is counting first. If the dotted quarter is the pulse, set beats per bar to 2 and turn on triplets, and each click group is one dotted-quarter beat divided into its three eighths. If you want the eighth note itself at 60, set the beat unit to 8 and beats per bar to 6. The metronome computes each beat's real length from both numbers, so it will not quietly give you a quarter-note pulse when you asked for an eighth-note one.
