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House BPM
House music runs at 115 to 130 BPM, and most of it at 122 to 128. The tempo of every house style, why 128, the drum pattern, and a groove at 124 to hum over.
Mika runs the app at 123. House is the room he sleeps in.Play the groove at this tempo, or tap the pad along with a track to check its tempo against the range.
124 BPM
House: 115–130 BPM
Hum over a groove at house tempo
The button opens Brumm at 124 BPM with the app's swing on. Tap Play, the app makes a beat at that tempo, you hum a line over it, and it comes back as an instrument in the loop. That gives you a swung groove at house tempo on the app's own kit, not a finished house record, and the drums are not a Chicago drum machine's.
How to make a house beat
Four kicks to the bar, a clap on two and four, an open hat on every offbeat: that is the house beat. MusicRadar’s classic house beat uses short, heavy kicks and adds two quieter "feel" hats nudged behind the beat with 16th swing, which is where the skip comes from. Amped Studio’s house beat guide sets the swing at 60 % and keeps the bass sparse: two or three notes a bar, landing between the kicks, in threes against the kick's fours. Sidechain the bass to the kick so it ducks on every beat, and build the track in 8- and 16-bar sections with an intro a DJ can mix on.
House drum pattern
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kick | ● | ● | ● | ● | ||||||||||||
| Clap | ● | ● | ||||||||||||||
| Open hat | ● | ● | ● | ● | ||||||||||||
| Hat | • | ● | • | • | ● | • | • | ● | • | • | ● | • | ||||
| Shaker | • | ● | • | ● | • | ● | • | ● | • | ● | • | ● | • | ● | • | ● |
The grid is the groove on this page, one bar of 16 steps: kick on steps 1, 5, 9 and 13, the clap on 5 and 13, the open hat on the and of every beat (3, 7, 11 and 15), closed hats and a shaker in between. To program it in any DAW, set those rows at 124 and swing the 16ths by 55 to 60 %; the kick and clap sit on the beat, so the swing only moves the hats and shaker. Tap Play and listen for the skip in the shaker.
House bassline
There is no bass in this groove; hum it. Two or three notes a bar are plenty, placed in the gaps between the kicks, and a figure of three against the kick's four keeps it moving. Sing it short, on "dm" or "bom", and it comes back as an instrument in the loop at 124.
How fast, and who says so
Where the two sources overlap: 115–130 BPM. Each in its own words:
- Wikipedia, House music: 115–130 BPM
- iZotope, Using Different Tempos To Make Beats For Different Genres (2021): 115–130 BPM
The groove on this page
What makes this house rather than techno at the same tempo is the swing. At 124 BPM an eighth note lasts 241.9 ms, and a straight 16th would fall halfway, 121.0 ms in. At the 56 % swing this groove plays, it falls at 135.5 ms, 14.5 ms late, so the hats and the shaker skip while the kick and clap stay on the beat. Move the tempo with − and +: the swing keeps its share of the beat at any speed.
On this page: the app's Starter kit at 124 BPM, swing 56 %.
Delay and LFO values
A delay in time with the track repeats once per note value: a quarter note lasts 60,000 divided by the BPM, in milliseconds. Dotted is one and a half times that, triplet two thirds. An LFO synced to a note value cycles at 1,000 divided by those milliseconds, in Hz. The table follows the tempo above: − and + move it, and so does a tempo you tap.
| Note | Straight | Dotted | Triplet | LFO Hz |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1/1 (a bar) | 1,935.5 | 2,903.2 | 1,290.3 | 0.52 |
| 1/2 | 967.7 | 1,451.6 | 645.2 | 1.03 |
| 1/4 (a beat) | 483.9 | 725.8 | 322.6 | 2.07 |
| 1/8 | 241.9 | 362.9 | 161.3 | 4.13 |
| 1/16 | 121.0 | 181.5 | 80.6 | 8.27 |
| 1/32 | 60.5 | 90.7 | 40.3 | 16.53 |
Genres near this tempo
- Deep house: 120–125 BPM
- Tech house: 125–128 BPM
- Techno: 125–135 BPM
- UK garage: about 130 BPM
All twenty genres on one axis, with 124 BPM marked: the BPM chart.
What BPM is house music, measured
The published range is wide; the records sit tighter. Wikipedia's house article gives 115 to 130 in its first line and 120 to 130 further down. Two counts of real records agree on the middle: Tempo Tunes' library of 32,361 house songs has a median of 126 with half of them between 122 and 130, and the DJ tool Mixgraph's March 2026 count of 3,587 house tracks has a median of 125 with nine in ten between 121 and 131.
Why 128? It is the single most common house tempo in the Tempo Tunes library, 4,354 songs, and Dirk Moelants' study of a decade of dance charts (Ghent University, 2008) found the same peak at 128. What EDM genre is 128 BPM? House, and with it tech house, progressive and the big-room festival sound: 128 is peak time. Is house music 120 BPM? 120 is the bottom of where most house sits (Wikipedia's second figure, 120 to 130). Deep, Afro and the slow Chicago records reach down to 118, and the published range to 115. What BPM is best for house? 124 to 126 sits inside nearly every style below, from deep to tech house. Can house music be 140 BPM? It can, and it has a name, UK hard house, at about 140 to 150, but a 140 track won't go into a 124 set without a jump the room hears.
House BPM by style
Nearly every style sits inside about 118 to 130, so the style is decided by chords, drums and bass, not speed; electro house and UK hard house are the faster exceptions. Deep and tech house carry the ranges of their own pages; medians are Mixgraph's 2026 counts where it measured the style; the rest follow Wikipedia's "Styles of house music" and the map DJs work with.
| Style | BPM | The sound | Start with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deep house | 120–125, median 123 (Wikipedia: 110–125) | 7th and 9th chords held over a bar, warm pads, understated vocals | Mr. Fingers, "Can You Feel It" (1986); Kerri Chandler |
| Chicago house | about 118–125 | raw drum machines, a piano or vocal hook | Marshall Jefferson, "Move Your Body" (1986) |
| Acid house | about 120–128 | the TB-303's squelching line | Phuture, "Acid Tracks" (1987) |
| Afro house | 118–125, median 122 | layered percussion at the front, chants | Black Coffee |
| Soulful house | 122–127 | gospel and soul vocals, live keys | Masters at Work |
| French house | about 118–126 | filtered disco loops | Daft Punk, "One More Time" (2000); Stardust, "Music Sounds Better with You" (1998) |
| Melodic house | 120–128, median 124 | arpeggios and long pads, close to melodic techno | Lane 8 |
| Progressive house | 120–128, median 123 | long builds, harmony moving every few bars | Sasha, John Digweed |
| Tech house | 125–128, median 126 | stripped drums, an off-beat distorted bass, little harmony | Fisher, "Losing It" (2018); Hot Since 82 |
| Future house | about 124–128 | a bouncy, metallic offbeat bass, short vocal chops | Oliver Heldens, Tchami |
| Bass house | about 128 | one heavy, distorted bass riff in the drop | Jauz |
| Electro house | 125–135 | big saw leads, the late-2000s festival sound | Benny Benassi, "Satisfaction" (2002) |
| Funky house | about 124–128 | disco loops, Latin percussion | the 2000s UK clubs |
| UK hard house | about 140–150 | hoover stabs, a pounding offbeat bass | Tony De Vit, the late-1990s UK clubs |
Deep, progressive and melodic house all sit within a beat of 123 (Mixgraph); chords and arrangement tell them apart, not tempo.
Two neighbours grew out of house and left its tempo: amapiano, slower, and UK garage, faster and broken. Nu-disco sits just below house, median 122 (Mixgraph).
House vs techno vs trance: BPM and sound
| House | Techno | Trance | |
|---|---|---|---|
| BPM | 115–130 | 125–135, faster in clubs | 130–150 |
| Swing | the 16ths shuffle | straight | straight |
| On top | chords, vocals, a clap on 2 and 4 | texture, rumble, little harmony | melody, long breakdowns, a lead |
| Bass | short notes between the kicks | low and short, under the kick's tail | a rolling 16th line between the kicks |
At 126 all three can share a room; the swing and what sits over the kick tell them apart. Techno house, usually filed as tech house, is where the first two meet: 125 to 128, median 126, with nine in ten of Mixgraph's 5,088 tech house tracks between 122 and 130. More on each: techno BPM, trance BPM.
What genre is 130 BPM? Techno, the top of tech house, trance's slow end and UK garage (techno BPM). The ideal BPM for EDM? There is no one number; 128 is the centre of the dance charts (Moelants). Techno at 140 is counted as 140; dubstep at 140 is felt at 70 (dubstep BPM). 160 is footwork and the bottom of drum and bass (drum and bass BPM). 1,000 BPM is extratone, on the techno page.
Where house came from
House is Chicago's. The Warehouse opened in 1977 with Frankie Knuckles as its resident, a New York DJ who re-edited disco, soul and European synth records and ran drum machines under them; record shops sold what he played as "Warehouse music", later house. Ron Hardy played the rawer version at the Music Box. Jesse Saunders' "On and On" (1984) is the record most often called the first house release, though that is argued. Trax and DJ International pressed the 12-inches that reached the UK charts from 1986 (Steve "Silk" Hurley's "Jack Your Body" was number one in January 1987), and three Roland machines set the sound: the TR-808 and TR-909 for the drums, the TB-303 for the squelch of acid house.
Mixing house: phrases and pitch
House is built in 8-, 16- and 32-bar phrases, so the next record starts at the top of one. At 124, 32 bars last 62 seconds and a 16-bar intro gives you 31. Taking a 124 record up to 128 is 3.2 % on the pitch fader and, with key lock off, about half a semitone higher: enough to rub against the next record's key, which is why house DJs mix in key as well as in time.
House songs and their BPM
DigMyLoop reads three classics off the audio at 123 BPM: Daft Punk's "One More Time", Disclosure's "Latch" and Robin S's "Show Me Love". Tempo Tunes lists Daft Punk's "The Prime Time of Your Life" at 128, DJ Koze's "Royal Asscher Cut" and Purple Disco Machine's "Pray for Me" at 118. Tap the pad above along with any record to check it yourself: house is the easy one, one kick on every beat.
Then make something of it
The door opens Brumm at the tempo on screen, with this genre's swing on or off, and the app names the tempo once on its start screen. Its range is 90 to 150 BPM, so a tempo outside goes in at half or double. No account, no upload: the tempo travels inside the link. Tap Play, hum a line over the beat, and it becomes an instrument.
Nothing is recorded: no microphone, only your taps, counted in the browser. The groove's sounds are the app's own samples, fetched when you tap Play. How the site counts visits.
Audio: tones your browser makes on this page; no microphone. Nothing about the audio reaches the visit count.
Facts checked on .