Tap tempo: tap to find the BPM

How to tap a tempo accurately

1. Find the pulse first. Listen for a few seconds before you start. Most people tap most consistently on the kick drum and snare — the “one, two, three, four” you would nod your head to.
2. Tap at least eight times. Two taps give a number, but a single early or late tap moves it a lot. The display marks the reading as steady once your last four taps agree within about 4%.
3. Keep going if it’s jumping. The calculation uses your last sixteen taps and ignores any interval that is more than a third away from the typical one, so one fumble doesn’t ruin the reading.
4. Pause to restart. Stop for two seconds and the next tap starts a fresh measurement — useful when the song changes or you want to check another track.

Why tap instead of detecting automatically?

Automatic detection is great when you have the file, and xx808 has a BPM finder that does exactly that. But often you don’t: the music is on a turntable, coming from a phone across the room, playing in a video, or being played by your band right now. Tapping also lets you decide what the beat is. A detector has to guess whether a half-time trap groove is 70 or 140 BPM; when you tap, you choose the level that matches how you hear it.

Tapping is a skill, and it improves with practice. Your accuracy depends on how steady your taps are; averaging over eight to twelve taps smooths out most of the natural wobble in human timing. If you need more precision than that — for example to beat-match vinyl or set a click track for a recording — tap through a longer passage and use the decimal reading rather than the rounded one.

Common tempos to check your result against

If your tapped number is roughly double or half of what you expected, you are probably tapping eighth notes or every other beat. Both are valid ways to count; just be consistent with whoever you are sharing the number with.

From tempo to delay time

Once you have a tempo, the table below the pad turns it into milliseconds for every common note length, including dotted and triplet values. That is the number to type into a delay pedal or plug-in without tempo sync, or into a compressor’s release, or a reverb’s pre-delay. A quarter note is 60,000 divided by the BPM; everything else is a simple fraction of that. You can also type any tempo directly into the tempo box to use the table on its own.

Where a tapped tempo comes in handy

• DJing: check whether two records are close enough in tempo to mix before you cue them, especially with vinyl or a controller without beat detection.
• Band practice: tap the tempo the drummer actually plays, then set the click track or backing tracks to match instead of guessing.
• Remixing and sampling: find the tempo of a loop you want to build around, then open the drum machine at that speed.
• Practice: tap along to a recording you are learning to see how far it is from the tempo you can play cleanly, and work up from there.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press Space or T to tap — the page listens for them anywhere except inside a text field. Each key press counts once, even if you hold the key down. On touch screens the pad responds the moment your finger lands rather than when it lifts, which removes the delay some phones add to taps.