Lay a lyric onto a beat grid at a tempo you set, and see which lines fit, which ones cram, and how fast you would actually be singing.
Most metre problems are not problems of stress or poetry, they are problems of arithmetic. A line with eleven syllables set to four beats means three of those beats have to hold two notes each, and unless you planned that, it will come out rushed and the last word will land late. This tool puts every line onto the grid: it counts syllables, spreads the words across the beats you specify, flags the beats carrying more than they comfortably hold, and works out the syllable rate for the tempo you chose. Reading a lyric against a grid like this is often enough to make the awkward line obvious.
Reading aloud uses your browser’s built-in speech voice if it has one. The grid works either way.
Paste a lyric and the grid builds here.
What a beat grid actually tells you
A line of lyric has a length in syllables. A bar of music has a fixed number of beats at a fixed tempo. When those two numbers do not agree, something has to give, and it is almost always the line: either two syllables share a beat, or a beat gets stretched over a word that did not want to be stretched. Neither is wrong, but doing it by accident is what makes a line feel like it is stumbling.
The other number worth watching is the syllable rate. At ninety beats per minute with four beats to a line, a comfortable eight-syllable line lands at roughly three syllables per second. Push the same line to a hundred and forty and you are near five per second, which is patter-song territory and needs a completely different kind of consonant writing. The grid does not judge that for you, but it puts the number in front of you before you find out on stage.
How to use the result
- Look at the hot beats first. A beat carrying three syllables is where the line will rush, and it is usually fixable by moving one short word rather than rewriting.
- Empty beats are not mistakes. A held word or a rest is fine, and if several lines share the same empty beat you have probably found the shape of the melody.
- If the syllable rate is above about four per second, check the consonants. Fast lines with heavy clusters are the ones that fall apart first.
- Change the beats-per-line figure rather than the lyric when you are testing. Four and eight are the common cases, but a line you wrote as six may sit better as two bars of three.
- Read it aloud and listen for where you run out of breath. The grid will not catch that; your lungs will.
Questions people ask
- Does it detect which syllable is stressed?
No. Stress in English is not recoverable from spelling with any reliability, and a tool that pretends otherwise is guessing about half the time. This counts syllables and places them on beats; where the accent falls is your call.
- How are words spread across beats?
Greedily, by balancing syllables: each word goes to the beat currently carrying the fewest, keeping the words in order. It is a reasonable default, not a claim about where your melody puts them.
- Why is my line flagged when it sounds fine?
Because the flag is a syllable count against a beat count, not a judgement about your phrasing. Lines that deliberately cram a beat — which most good lines do somewhere — will always show up.
- Does the read-aloud voice follow the tempo?
It approximates it by setting the speech rate from your BPM. Browser voices vary a lot and none of them are metronomes, so use it to hear the shape of a line, not to check timing.
What this tool does not do. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and it works with the internet switched off. Syllable counts come from a spelling heuristic that is right most of the time and wrong on words like “fire”, “hour” and “rhythm”, so check the counts on unusual words. It cannot hear stress, melody or breath. See the site disclaimer. Written by Nico, who builds these tools and writes about writing at WrittenTone.