To find the BPM of a song by ear, count the beats you hear in 15 seconds and multiply by four. Tap along with a stopwatch, or with a BPM tapper, for a faster and steadier answer. Then ask the one question that catches most people out: did you count the grid, or the slow half-time feel on top of it? A beat that feels like 70 is very often 140 on the grid.
This guide covers counting by hand, tapping, half-time and double-time by genre, and how to set your DAW to match a sample.
What a BPM actually counts
BPM is beats per minute, and a beat is the pulse you would naturally tap your foot to. In most pop, hip-hop and dance music that is a quarter note, and four of them make a bar. So a tempo of 90 means 90 of those pulses in a minute, or one every two thirds of a second. The tricky part is that "the pulse you tap to" is partly a human choice: tap the kick, the snare or the hi-hats and you get different numbers.
Count it by hand
You need a song, a clock and about half a minute.
- Play a section of the track where the drums or the rhythm are clear.
- Find the beat. Nod along until it feels natural, and stay on one pulse. The kick or the downbeat of each bar is a good one.
- Start a 15-second timer and count every beat out loud, "one, two, three, four, five, six", and so on without restarting at each bar.
- When the timer ends, note how many beats you counted.
- Multiply by four. Thirty-seven beats in 15 seconds is 148 BPM.
Why 15 seconds and not one? Counting over a short window has a built-in rounding error: if you are off by one beat in 15 seconds, the answer is off by four BPM, and that is the limit of the method. Counting over a full 30 seconds and multiplying by two halves that error. Doing it twice and comparing is better than doing it once carefully.
Tap it
Tapping is the same idea with the maths done for you. A tapper times the gap between each tap, averages the recent gaps and shows the result as BPM. The BPM tapper on ColabLoop works in the browser: tap the pad, or press space or T, on every beat. It averages the last eight gaps, throws out a gap that is far from the rest, and starts again after two seconds of silence.
Getting a good reading is mostly technique.
- Tap on one thing. The kick or the first beat of each bar is better than a busy hi-hat.
- Keep going for ten taps or more. The first few taps give a rough number that settles as more arrive.
- Reset after a stumble. If you miss a beat, one wrong gap is not the end, but a run of uneven taps is. Press reset and start again.
- Check the answer by playing a click. Set a metronome to the result and play it over the track. If the click and the track slide apart within a few bars, the number is slightly off. The tapper has a "Play on a click" control for exactly this, with plus and minus buttons to nudge the tempo.
A tapper gives you an average. A recording played by live musicians, or a track with a tempo change, has no single number, and no tool will invent one.
Half-time and double-time
The same record can honestly be called 70 or 140, and this is where most disagreements about tempo come from.
Half-time means the grid runs at one speed but the backbeat lands half as often, so the track feels slower than its number. In trap, drill and much modern hip-hop the hi-hats roll at the grid speed while the snare lands on beat three of the bar, not on two and four. Tap the hi-hats and you get something like 140. Tap the snare and you get something like 70. Both are right about the same record. The usual convention is to give the grid number, which is why trap loops are normally labelled near 140 even though they feel heavy and slow. Our guide to BPM by genre lists where each style usually sits, and the trap beat guide explains the feel.
Double-time is the reverse: the grid runs at one speed, but the drums or the vocal run twice as fast. A rapper can go double-time over a 90 BPM beat without the tempo changing. A track at 90 that feels busy is often a 90, not a 180.
A few rules of thumb help you decide, and they are only that:
- Hip-hop and boom bap usually sit between 80 and 100. If you tapped 160 on a boom bap loop, halve it.
- Trap and drill usually sit between 130 and 160. If you tapped 70 on a hi-hat-heavy trap beat, double it.
- House and club music usually sit between about 118 and 145, played straight, with a kick on every beat. If you can hear four kicks per bar, you are almost certainly counting the right pulse.
Whichever you pick, say it out loud: "140, half-time feel". A collaborator who reads only "70" and opens a trap loop in a 70 BPM project will find everything at the wrong speed.
Match your DAW to a sample
Once you know the tempo, set the project to it before you drag the audio in. A sample dropped into a project at a different tempo is either left alone, so it drifts against everything else, or is stretched to fit, which can smear the sound.
- Set the project tempo to your counted or tapped number. Type it in rather than nudging.
- Drop the audio on a track and play it over the metronome. A sample that starts on a bar line should stay on the bar line.
- Listen for drift. If the audio is ahead of the click after eight bars, your number is slightly high. If it falls behind, slightly low. Adjust by a tenth of a BPM at a time, and a tapped figure such as 92.4 is a good starting point.
- If the DAW offers auto-detect, treat it as a second opinion. Detection can land on half or double of the pulse you meant, so check it by ear.
If the sample is a recording with an uneven tempo, no single BPM will hold, and you will need warping.
Warping basics
Warping, or time-stretching, adjusts a piece of audio so its beats line up with your project's grid. Most DAWs do it with markers placed on the audio's transients. You drag a marker onto the beat and the software stretches or squeezes the audio between markers.
- Warp from a clean downbeat. Place the first marker on a hit you are sure of, usually the first kick.
- Small moves keep the sound. A stretch of a few percent usually passes unnoticed. Bigger changes smear transients and add artefacts, especially on drums and plucks.
- Half and double are often kinder than a stretch. A 142 BPM loop can run at 71 in a 71 BPM project with no stretching at all, which is why a slow melody can sit under a fast drum pattern.
If your sample is a short loop, you may not need to warp it at all. A loop that is cut to a whole number of bars at the right tempo repeats on its own. For how to cut one cleanly, see how to make a seamless loop.
Label the tempo when you send it
Once you know a loop's BPM, put it where a collaborator will see it: in the file name and on the upload. A name that says "92bpm" and the key saves a message back and forth, and a good loop file name does the same job. If the loop feels half as fast as its grid, say so. For finding loops at a given tempo, the loops page has a tempo filter, and the tapper links to it with your number filled in.
Questions producers ask
How accurate is counting beats by ear?
Counting over 15 seconds is accurate to within about four BPM if you miss a single beat. Counting over 30 seconds, or averaging a few counts, narrows that. For a tighter figure, use a tapper and then check it against a click.
Why does a tapper give me half the BPM I expected?
You probably tapped the slower pulse, such as the snare of a half-time beat, rather than the grid. Double the number, or tap again on the kick or hi-hats.
Is there one correct BPM for a song?
For a track made on a grid, the project tempo is the correct number, and it is usually a whole number. For a live recording, tempo drifts, so any single figure is an average.