BPM: Late Night City Life

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
88.2 BPM
Beats per bar
4 beats
Bars per minute
22.1
Length of 1 beat
0.6803 sec
Length of 1 bar
2.7211 sec
Beats per second
1.47 Hz

Fractions for base 16

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


1/16
1/16
6.25%
170 ms
5.88 Hz

2/16
1/8
12.5%
340 ms
2.94 Hz

3/16
3/16
18.75%
510 ms
1.96 Hz

4/16
1/4
25%
680 ms
1.47 Hz

5/16
5/16
31.25%
850 ms
1.18 Hz

6/16
3/8
37.5%
1 020 ms
0.980 Hz

7/16
7/16
43.75%
1 190 ms
0.840 Hz

8/16
1/2
50%
1 361 ms
0.735 Hz

9/16
9/16
56.25%
1 531 ms
0.653 Hz

10/16
5/8
62.5%
1 701 ms
0.588 Hz

11/16
11/16
68.75%
1 871 ms
0.535 Hz

12/16
3/4
75%
2 041 ms
0.490 Hz

13/16
13/16
81.25%
2 211 ms
0.452 Hz

14/16
7/8
87.5%
2 381 ms
0.420 Hz

15/16
15/16
93.75%
2 551 ms
0.392 Hz

16/16
1/1
100%
2 721 ms
0.368 Hz

24/16
3/2
150%
4 082 ms
0.245 Hz

32/16
2/1
200%
5 442 ms
0.184 Hz

48/16
3/1
300%
8 163 ms
0.123 Hz

64/16
4/1
400%
10 884 ms
0.0919 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