Lo-fi BPM

How fast, and who says so

Where the two sources overlap: 60–80 BPM. Each in its own words:

• Soundtrap, How To Make Lo-fi Music (2023): 60–85 BPM
• ModeAudio, LoFi Hip Hop: 5 Production Essentials (2025): 60–80 BPM

The groove on this page

Boom bap slowed and softened: a kick on the one and the and of three, joined in the second bar by one on the last 16th of beat two; a soft snare on two and four, quiet hats in 8ths, one soft percussion hit a bar. Swing at 60 % puts every second 16th 39 ms late at 76 BPM, which drags that second-bar kick behind the grid. Soundtrap's guide sets swing between 50 and 60 %. Four parts, the snare barely louder than the hats: lo-fi leaves the space empty.

On this page: the app's Soft kit at 76 BPM, swing 60 %.

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.

Genres near this tempo

• R&B: 80–90 BPM
• Hip hop: 85–95 BPM
• Reggaeton: about 90 BPM
• Pop: 80–104 BPM

All twenty genres on one axis, with 76 BPM marked: the BPM chart.

Lo-fi BPM: the sweet spot and the edges

Most lo-fi hip hop you hear sits at 70 to 85 BPM (r/LofiHipHop; Songer: 75 to 85), a little above where the guides draw the range, and 80 is a good tempo for a first beat. The guides:

Under 65 it starts to sound like ambient with drums. Over 90 it is plain boom bap, the tempo the style came from. All of it in 4/4.

Why some lo-fi tracks read 160 BPM or more

A BPM detector counts what it hears most, often the hats, and gets double. Tunebat lists "Relaxed Focus LoFi Beats" at 160 BPM; you nod to it at 80. The records the style grew from show the same thing: SongBPM lists Nujabes' "Feather" (2005) at 181 and J Dilla's "Time: The Donut of the Heart" (2006) at 187, nodded to at about 90 and 93, while Madvillain's "Accordion" (2004) reads 96 straight. Some producers write lo-fi at 140 to 170 on purpose, with a half-time groove, for finer hat placement. Halve the number until it lands between 60 and 95. On the pad above, tap every beat, kick and snare alike, not the hats.

Those founding records ran at 90 or more. The lo-fi of the 24-hour study streams settled lower, at 70 to 85. Lo-fi songs by BPM, staples of the streams and playlists (SongBPM, 2026):

The lo-fi drum pattern

The plainest lo-fi beat is a kick on one and three and a snare on two and four (Lunacy Audio's pattern 1). Add a kick just before three and another on the and of three (its pattern 2), and it becomes boom bap. Three things then make it lo-fi: few parts, often three and sometimes two (ModeAudio); soft hits; and one part played off the grid, the J Dilla habit ModeAudio points to. The first bar of this page's groove:

The second bar adds a kick on the last 16th of beat two, swung late. For your own: soft, round kick and snare samples, a low-pass on the drums (ModeAudio pulls them to about 2 kHz), swing the 16ths at 50 to 60 %, and nudge the snare a little behind the beat by hand.

Lo-fi chord progressions

Lo-fi harmony is jazz harmony in small doses: seventh and ninth chords, two to four of them, looped for the whole track. Six loops, with their notes:

Voice the chords close together and move one note at a time between them; play them on a Rhodes, a felt piano or a muted guitar. Hum a melody into Chords for my melody and it suggests chords that fit it.

What key is lo-fi in?

There is no lo-fi key. A sampled loop brings its own, and soul and jazz samples often sit in flat keys. Producers who play their chords tend to start where sevenths fall under the hand: C and F major, A, D and E minor. Minor colour and major-seventh chords matter more than which key. The key pages carry each key's chords: A minor, F major, E♭ major.

What makes a beat sound lo-fi

Lo-fi is short for low fidelity: a hip hop beat that keeps the faults of old gear on purpose, mostly instrumental, slow and looped. What gives it that sound:

• Filtering: the drums low-passed to about 2 kHz (ModeAudio), or a gentle cut at 8 to 12 kHz on the whole mix (Songer).
• Noise: vinyl crackle, tape hiss, a recording of rain.
• Wobble: a slow, shallow pitch drift, like a worn tape.
• The samplers' colour: Roland's SP-303 and SP-404 each had a dedicated lo-fi effect, and the sound grew up on them.
• The bass on the chord roots, filtered under about 150 Hz (ModeAudio), or none at all: many lo-fi beats let the keys and the kick carry the low end (Native Instruments).
• Short and looped: often one to three minutes (Native Instruments), a loop that barely changes.

Where lo-fi hip hop comes from

From the beat scene of the 2000s: Madlib and MF DOOM's "Madvillainy" (2004), Nujabes' music for the anime "Samurai Champloo" (2004), J Dilla's "Donuts" (2006), all at boom-bap tempos with dusty samples and late drums. From 2015, YouTube's 24-hour streams made it "lo-fi hip hop" or "chillhop", slower and softer, and Lofi Girl (formerly ChilledCow) gave it its picture: an anime girl studying in headphones. Viewing grew during the 2020 lockdowns (Wikipedia, "Lo-fi hip hop", after MTV News, April 2020). Chillhop is the same music under another name, at the same tempos.

Making a lo-fi beat on a phone

The button above takes this groove into the Brumm app, in the phone's browser on Android or iPhone, no install. The app runs at 90 to 150 BPM: this page's 76 goes in at 90, its slowest, and a tempo of 75 or below goes in doubled. Hum a melody over the beat and it becomes an instrument. To take a hummed line into a DAW, Hum to MIDI makes it a MIDI file.

Then make something of it

The door opens Brumm, a club track with a beat and a bass, with this groove's low end in it. The app runs between 90 and 150 BPM, so a tempo outside goes in at half or double, or at the nearest end when neither fits. No account, no upload: it travels inside the link. Hum a line over it, 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.