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Rhythm

BPM and tempo

BPM means beats per minute: how many beats, the steady pulse you would nod or stamp to, fit in sixty seconds. 60 BPM is one beat a second; 120 is two. Tempo is that speed as a feel, from a slow walk to a sprint, and every genre has a neighbourhood on the ladder. Press play on a rung to hear the same beat at that tempo, or Climb to hear it walk up the whole ladder.

The tempo ladder

The same backbeat on every rung; Climb moves up two bars at a time.

  2. Hear the real lo-fi hip hop loop

  3. Hear the real boom bap loop

  5. Hear the real reggaeton loop

  10. Hear the real house loop

  15. Hear the real trap loop

  17. Hear the real drum & bass loop

Hear tempo, then set your own

Unit 1 of the course is free with a Google sign-in: the loop, the beat, tempo as walking speed and your first beat on the grid.

Pick up where you left off

Carry on with Unit 1; tempo is its third lesson.

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How to hear tempo

Walking speed. The easiest way to feel a tempo is to walk to it. A slow walk is about 70 BPM, a brisk one about 110, a jog 130 and a run 160. The course’s free Tempo lesson has you sort real tracks that way before it ever shows a number.

Faster is not busier. A track at 90 BPM with hats on every sixteenth can sound busier than one at 140 with a hat on every beat. Tempo is the pulse; how many notes sit between pulses is a separate dial. Faster notes in Unit 1 pulls the two apart.

Half-time and double-time. Trap and dubstep are written at about 140 BPM, but their snare lands once a bar, on beat 3, so the body hears 70. That is the half-time feel: the written tempo is double what you would tap. The reverse happens with fast shuffles, which read as double their real tempo. When two people disagree about a song’s BPM by exactly a factor of two, this is why.

Finding a tempo. Tap along to a song on the tap tempo page and it reads the BPM back, with the genres that live there. The metronome goes the other way: set a number, hear a click, or hear a genre’s own drums at that speed.

Why genres cluster. Each style has a tempo range because its patterns only work at certain speeds. House’s off-beat hats lift the beat at 124 and drag at 100; a two-step break needs 170 or more to roll; the dembow sways at 95 and rushes at 110. Change the tempo of any genre loop on Swung by 20 BPM and you can hear it fall out of its own neighbourhood.