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Does anyone know whether a bar counting metronome exists?

I'm focusing on singing and playing the guitar at the same time and feel a visual bar counter would help me to keep in time. I was hoping for example one could program the metronome to perhaps change the tone of the metronome click after a period of bars that you set, say 8 bars. Better still it could have a light display which changed colour at the set points. I've had a little look on Google but can't seem to find anything?

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  • Is this for rehearsing or performance? Many arranger keyboards have measure counters. If you want to develop your time, practice with metronomes that don't play the clicks all of the time, so your brain has to start producing the beats itself. For example, a click on only every third or fourth beat.
    – piiperi Reinstate Monica
    Oct 25, 2019 at 17:26
  • Thanks Piiperi, that's certainly an idea although I'm not sure it would work entirely in my case. I want a guide to keep my guitar playing/strumming tighter. What I find is that when I'm singing at the same time as playing my guitaring can have tendency to just follow the vocals. This can be a problem when a particular verse fits rather awkwardly with a strumming pattern. Therefore whilst I like your idea i'm not sure it'll work to just define specific chord breaks. That said I'm going to give it a go. Thanks
    – Shimmerinlights
    Oct 26, 2019 at 11:55

3 Answers 3

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I don't know of any such thing, but you could program a simple drum pattern to change the sound every so often. You could do this with the free version of just about any DAW or "drum machine" software.

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    Thanks DMB. That's a good idea. That may well work. I do have a daw I just need to learn to programme it. :)
    – Shimmerinlights
    Oct 26, 2019 at 11:57
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I think but am not certain that some metronomes, or metronome apps for phones/tablets, can be set to have multiple pattern sounds, such as heavy down beat, light beats 2,3,4 (in 4/4 time), and different sound for beat divisions. If you can find one of those, just "reassign" the heavy down beat to your measure bar, set the "light beats" to the downbeat in each measure, and the "beat division" sounds to the light beats in each measure.

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  • Forgive me if I misunderstand your answer, but OP is looking for a metronome which can display a certain number of bars, not just go 'ping, click, click, click'. So a pattern over say, 8 bars, then another sound to herald the next 8, etc.
    – Tim
    Oct 25, 2019 at 15:01
  • @Tim my solution won't display but I'm taking advantage of having at least three distinct sounds to use.
    – Carl Witthoft
    Oct 25, 2019 at 17:20
  • Thanks Carl and Tim. Yes Tim that's certainly the case but I will see if there's a way to get Tim's idea to work. Thanks both. :)
    – Shimmerinlights
    Oct 26, 2019 at 11:59
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You can try out SongPartTrackingMetronome on my wellhoefer.info site, it does exactly what you want: http://wellhoefer.info/metro

"SongPartTrackingMetronome is a simple programmable visual and acoustic metronome with bar-based song part tracking capabilities that guide the user through a song."

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    Hi Hans-Peter, welcome to Music.SE! I invite you to edit your answer to include some of the necessary information from the link. That way, if the link ever goes dead (what we call "link rot"), your answer is still helpful and can help individuals find your recommendation.
    – Richard
    Jun 2, 2021 at 18:50
  • @Soren - please remember, if you are posting links to your own site, you must list the attribution.
    – Doktor Mayhem ♦
    Oct 15, 2023 at 13:34

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