How To BPM Your Music

For DJing - Beat Mixing/Matching

If you're a DJ, BPMs come in handy for mixing two tracks together. In order to mix two tracks you need to adjust their BPMs to match (more in another lens on mixing).

When you already know the BPM of a track it can help you find other tracks that have the same, or similar, BPMs to mix.

For Non-DJs

Non-DJs can benefit from knowing the BPMs of music so they can set the order of music in a playlist based on BPM, eg. from slowest to fastest. This means you can control the tempo continuity of your playlists, creating playlists that slowly speed up, or speed up to a climax in the middle, then wind down towards the end.

Knowing the BPM of your music can help you become more creative in how you play it.

You can count the BPM of nearly any type of music, from virtually any source; records, ipods, cd players, live bands, etc.

Although there's quite a few ways to count the BPM automatically (see below), I think it's important to understand how BPM is counted and how to do it manually.

For my explanation I'll be referring to the track "Baby Phat" by De La Soul.

Firstly, if your source has an adjustable pitch control, make sure the track is playing at the original pitch, eg. if you're playing a record, make sure the pitch control is set to 0. This ensures you're counting the BPM of the music at it's originally intended playing speed.

A lot of tutorials tell you to just count the kick drums you hear in 30 seconds and double it. While this works for most types of dance music, disco, etc. hip hop doesn't usually use that continuous kick drum pattern where a kick sound is heard on every beat. Instead, the basic hip hop drum pattern is usually kick, snare, kick, snare, etc. So you need to count the kicks and the snares that you hear in the rhythm of the beat.

Start playing the music. Using a watch, or stop-watch, count how many times you hear the kick and the snare in 30 seconds. You want to make sure you are only counting the main kick & snare sounds, not every little accented sound. Once you've counted for 30 seconds, stop, double the number of beats you counted and you should be very close to the BPM.

For "Baby Phat", it has a BPM of 97. If you were using that track to count the BPM, for 30 seconds you would probably have counted around 48 or 49 beats.

If you were way off, or couldn't quite tell which beats to count, take a look at the tips section below.

Below is a YouTube video from a guy who explains how to count the BPM of a track. Keep in mind that he is BPMing a dance track, but the underlying principals are still the same.

Old school heads would argue that you don't need anything other than the method above to count the BPM and that BPM doesn't have to be 100% accurate (a couple of beats out either way can be fixed "in the mix") as it should just be used as a guideline for mixing.

Anyway, there are some easier ways to count the BPM of your music. These could come in very handy for people with large existing collections of music.

Hardware

A lot of mixers these days have built in BPM counters, that you can "tap" to the beat and it will tell you the BPM. They can do this a lot quicker than having to count for 30 or 60 seconds.

There are also stand alone products that you can tap on to count the BPM.

Software

There a pieces of software that can emulate this "tapping" technique. They take the basic form of a program you install on your computer and you tap the enter or space key on your keyboard, along to the beat you a playing. You usually only need to tap away for about 10-15 seconds to get an accurate BPM count for a track.

There are also some automatic BPM couting pieces of software. While running the software on your computer, you run your audio source also through the computer and the software can count the BPM for you. While these programs do not always work with every song, I've usually found that they have a 99% hit rate.

Useful Software

BeatMaster (http://www.sonicspot.com/beatmaster/beatmaster.html)
- I prefer the older versions (I have v4.4) because you don't need to stop & clear the counter between tracks. BeatMaster will stop counting after a few seconds of inactivity, then when you start tapping again it will began from 0,00.

AutoBPM (http://www.pyramidedata.dk/autobpm.html)

Useful Websites
There are quite a few websites with searchable databases of BPMs contributed by users. Two of the better ones are:

BPM Database (http://www.bpmdatabase.com/index.php)

BPM4DJs (http://www.bpm4djs.com/)

Sometimes in the beginning you might find it hard to tell which "beats" you should be counting. Often in hip hop there are many kicks close together, and other bass sounds playing at the same time, so it may be hard to tell which is the main kick.

Use the snares as a guide

Try listening for the snares. Are they repeated with the same timing? If they are constant, then there should be a kick drum between them.

Nod your head

Try nodding your head to the beat, or rocking side to side on beat. Most people naturally move to the beat, often without realising it. You might move on beat, but at half time, factor that it to your BPM counting.

Practice on tracks you know the BPM for already

To get some practice at manually counting the BPM, try searching for a few tracks that you have using one of the BPM databases above. Write down what the BPM is from the database. Then play the track and try to arrive at the same BPM.

Use a consistent part of the beat

You don't need to play a track from the very begining to count the BPM. Often tracks have intros with different BPM, or talking, or whatever, so it can be confusing. Try BPMing the track from part way through, where there is a consistent part of the track that involves the drums.

Sometimes BPM is not constant

Often with live, or older recordings (say, before the 80's) the BPM will drift throughout the track. This is just a result of the player's natural timings and slight drifts occur.