BPM: No Friends In The Industry

Give tempo and time signature

The speed at which music is played/performed is expressed as beats-per-minute or BPM. The more BPM, the faster the music goes. Most music uses the same BPM range as the human heartbeat: 60-140 bpm.
A base of 16 means that the bar is divided in 16 parts of length 1/16. The most common bases are 4, 8, 16 or 32. Use base 12 or 24 if you also want calculations for triplets.
This is also used in "Quantising": the process of snapping notes to the nearest beat subdivision.

Quick BPM overview

Beats per minute
83.7 BPM
Beats per bar
4 beats
Bars per minute
20.9
Length of 1 beat
0.7168 sec
Length of 1 bar
2.8674 sec
Beats per second
1.395 Hz

Fractions for base 16

These are some common fractions (handy for setting delays, LFO and modulation parameters)


1/16
1/16
6.25%
179 ms
5.58 Hz

2/16
1/8
12.5%
358 ms
2.79 Hz

3/16
3/16
18.75%
538 ms
1.86 Hz

4/16
1/4
25%
717 ms
1.39 Hz

5/16
5/16
31.25%
896 ms
1.12 Hz

6/16
3/8
37.5%
1 075 ms
0.930 Hz

7/16
7/16
43.75%
1 254 ms
0.797 Hz

8/16
1/2
50%
1 434 ms
0.697 Hz

9/16
9/16
56.25%
1 613 ms
0.620 Hz

10/16
5/8
62.5%
1 792 ms
0.558 Hz

11/16
11/16
68.75%
1 971 ms
0.507 Hz

12/16
3/4
75%
2 151 ms
0.465 Hz

13/16
13/16
81.25%
2 330 ms
0.429 Hz

14/16
7/8
87.5%
2 509 ms
0.399 Hz

15/16
15/16
93.75%
2 688 ms
0.372 Hz

16/16
1/1
100%
2 867 ms
0.349 Hz

24/16
3/2
150%
4 301 ms
0.232 Hz

32/16
2/1
200%
5 735 ms
0.174 Hz

48/16
3/1
300%
8 602 ms
0.116 Hz

64/16
4/1
400%
11 470 ms
0.0872 Hz

How to use this page

If you have a 135 BPM song, and you want a phase modulation of 4 beats: that is 1.778 sec
If you have a 98 BPM song in a measure of 3/4, and you want to know how long 8 bars is: 14.7 sec
If you have a 128 BPM song, and you want an audio delay of 2/3 of a beat: this is 313 ms
If you have a 80 BPM song, and you want an LFO of 5/4 of a bar: this is 4687.5 ms

Musical genres

These are some popular modern music genres with typical BPM speeds.

Slow dub/reggae
Fast dub/reggae
Deep house
Slow house
Electro house
Trance
Dubstep
Hard house
Jungle
Drum&Bass
Gabber

Music calculators & converters

Beats-per-minute
Convert BPM to Hz, bar length, fractions
Audio delay
Calculate audio delay length in msec
Music Frequency
Convert pitch to musical note and wavelength
Song length
Calculate song length from BPM
Music Scale
Generate scales with frequencies
Tap your tempo
Tap to find the BPM of a song or a heartbeat