Tip - How To Figure Out BPM Of A Song

I don't know how many times I've needed to know the BPM of a song. Sometimes it's for a accapella that I want to remix with my own beat, or maybe I recorded a song to a beat someone else made and I want to remix that. Maybe you are a dj and want to get a set together and need to know the BPM of a song to see the best song you can mix into it.

Whatever your reason for needing to get the BPM of a song, here is how you do it.

First you need to have a clock or a watch with seconds on it. It doesn't matter if its a stop watch, a wrist watch, the clock on the wall or your computer clock. Next play the song you want to find the BPM of. Next you wait for the second hand to run across the minute mark, 30 second mark or whatever mark you can easily reference in order to get a perfect starting time. Now all you have to do is count the beats. If you don't know what ones to count, the beat is where the first kick hits and usually where the snare hits. Some drum patterns are complicated and hard to figure out for some people, so it might take you awhile to get it sometimes. A easy way to know the beat is to just count at the time you nod your head, that's usually the beat.

Count the beats for either 10, 15, 20 or 30 seconds. The longer you count the more accurate it will end up being in the long run. Then you multiply the number you got after the seconds are up by how the amount you would need to to make the seconds a whole minute. For example, if you did it for 15 seconds and you got 20 beats in that 15 seconds, multiply 20 by 4 because 15 seconds times 4 is 60 seconds, and 60 seconds is a minute. So 20 times 4 is 80. The beat you just listened to was 80 BPM roughly.

Sometimes you need to mess around and find the perfect BPM because producers might arrange the tempo around the sample and not just a round number for the BPM, so that takes a little more time and effort.

There are programs you can use and application in other programs that try to detect the beat, but these programs aren't always accurate. I also found a link to a page that has a lot of songs BPMs already calculated and recorded. You can find the site here : http://www.djbpmstudio.com/index.html

Hope this was helpful! Let me know if you want me to touch on any subjects by dropping me a comment or email at cheebsbeats@gmail.com Take care!!

-Cheebs