Tap along, read the tempo
This page opens the BPM finder on its tap tempo pad, for music you can hear but don’t have as a file: a song on the radio or in another app, a band in rehearsal, a record, or the tempo in your head. Tap the pad, or press Space, Enter or T, once per beat.
- BPM is fitted through all the taps in the window (the last 8 by default) at once, rather than averaging the gaps, so one late tap moves the number much less.
- Steadiness shows how much the tempos between single taps vary (their standard deviation), in ± BPM.
- Beat length is one beat in milliseconds.
- A pause of 2.5 seconds starts a new count, so you can tap the verse, stop, and tap the chorus to compare. R or Esc resets at any time.
Note lengths for delays and effects
The table under the pad turns the tapped tempo into milliseconds for each note value, counting each tap as a quarter note. Dotted notes are one and a half times as long, triplets two thirds as long. A dotted eighth delay at 120 BPM is 375 ms; a quarter-note triplet at 90 BPM is 444 ms. Type the number into a plugin, a reverb’s pre-delay or a looper, or use it to check that a pedal’s own tap tempo landed where you meant.
Getting a good reading
Tap the pulse, not the rhythm. Follow the kick and snare, or the beat you would clap to, rather than the melody or the hi-hats.
Give it eight taps or more. The first few taps are mostly reaction time. When Steadiness drops below a couple of BPM and the number stops moving, you’re done.
Mind the doubling. If the result is twice what you expected, you were tapping eighth notes; if it’s half, every other beat.
If you have the song as a file, the audio file tab of the BPM finder analyzes the whole track and gives a tempo accurate to a fraction of a BPM. To program a beat at the tempo you found, set it in the drum machine; to turn a recorded melody into notes, try audio to MIDI.