HOW TO FIND THE BPM OF A SONG. count it, then check it

BPM means beats per minute: how many times the steady pulse of a song goes by in sixty seconds. At 60 BPM there is one beat a second. At 120 there are two. It’s the number a drummer counts in with, the number a band’s click is set to, and the number you step down when you want to practise a song slower.

The beat is the pulse your foot finds without thinking, not the busiest thing in the track. A hi-hat playing sixteenth notes and a pad holding one chord for four bars can sit on the same beat. If you count the hi-hat you’ll get a number four times too high; if you count the chord changes you’ll get one far too low. So the first job is to feel the pulse, and only then to count it.

In most pop, rock, worship and country songs, the pulse is easy to find once you listen for the drums: the kick drum tends to land on beats 1 and 3, and the snare on 2 and 4. Tap your foot on all four, kick and snare alike, and you’re tapping the beat. In a ballad with no drums, follow the strum of the guitar or the left hand of the piano instead.

Why bother with the number? Because it travels. Write “143” on a chart and anyone in the band can set a click to it. Note the tempo you can play a riff cleanly at today, and next week you’ll know whether you’ve got faster. And once you know the BPM, slowing a song down stops being a guess: 0.75× of 143 is 107, and that’s a number you can climb back up from.

You need the song, a clock or a phone stopwatch, and about a minute. Pick a stretch of the song where the band is playing steadily, such as a chorus, rather than a free-time intro or a held ending.

The screenshot is the Studio’s demo song, Coming Home. Its header reads 143 BPM, which works out at about 36 beats in 15 seconds. With the metronome switched on, the four dots beside it light up one by one with the bar, and the grid below shows the same four beats in every bar of the chart.

The most common mistake in finding a tempo isn’t a miscount. It’s counting the right pulse at the wrong level. A slow, heavy groove at 70 BPM can feel like 140 if you follow the hi-hat; a fast punk song at 180 can feel like 90 if you tap only the snare. Both answers describe the same song, and key and BPM sites regularly list one where you’d expect the other.

The test is the snare. In most songs with a drum kit, the snare hits on beats 2 and 4 of each bar. Tap your count and say “one, two, three, four” out loud: if the snare lands on your “two” and “four”, your count is the usual one. If it lands only on “three”, you’re counting double time; halve it. If it lands on every count, you’re counting half time; double it.

When you still can’t decide, think about how a drummer would count the band in. Nobody counts in a ballad at 140, and nobody counts in a fast rock song at 75. Pick the number the band would actually play to.

In the Chord Lens Studio you can hear both in a few seconds. Turn the metronome on and switch between 0.5×, 1× and 2×: at 0.5× it clicks every other beat, at 2× twice a beat. One of the three will sit in the groove the way you feel it, and the one that does tells you whether the number above it is the tempo you’d count.

A song recorded to a click holds one tempo from the first bar to the last, and any method gives you the same answer anywhere in it. Plenty of songs weren’t recorded that way. Live takes push in the chorus and settle in the verse, ballads breathe, and older records drift a few BPM over three minutes. Count the intro and the last chorus and you may get two different numbers, and both can be right.

For those songs a single BPM is an average. That is still useful, since it tells you roughly where the band sits, but don’t expect a fixed metronome set to it to stay with the record for long. Within a few bars the two drift apart, and it sounds as if you’re the one rushing.

Chord Lens handles this in two parts. The header shows one BPM for the song, counted from the beats it tracked through the recording. The metronome doesn’t tick at that number, though: it clicks on each tracked beat, so when the band pushes, the click pushes with it. That makes it a better practice partner for a live recording than any metronome app, which can only hold the tempo you set.

Some music has no steady beat to count: a free-time intro, a rubato piano verse, an ambient opening. There, any BPM is a guess. The Studio’s click can land early or late in those passages, and if a song has no tracked beats at all it clicks at the song’s average tempo. Count from the first bar where the band locks in.

Practise slower, in numbers. Once you know the song is 143, practise the hard part at 107 (0.75×) and step up a few BPM at a time. In the Studio the BPM stepper runs from half the song’s tempo to double, one BPM a press, and the pitch stays where it is. Our guide to slowing a song down without changing the pitch has the full routine.

Set the band’s click. Tell the drummer the tempo before rehearsal instead of humming it. If the record drifts, give the tempo of the chorus, which is where the energy is and where a band most often rushes.

Write it on the chart. A tempo at the top of a chord chart saves a conversation every time the song comes back. When you print a chart from the Studio, the header carries the key, the capo and the BPM it was written for.

Keep it in time. The YouTube Metronome puts the click on the song’s own beats, with beat one accented, so you can play the whole song against it. Slow the song down and the click slows with it.

The tempo is half of what you need before you play along; the other half is the key. If you haven’t yet, find the key of the song next. Song Key Finder shows both at once, and in Chrome the extension puts them beside the YouTube video.