Reggaeton BPM

How fast, and who says so

Both sources settle on about 90 BPM:

• Native Instruments, What is reggaeton? (2023): around 90 BPM
• Orphiq, What Is Reggaeton? (2026): 85–100 BPM

The groove on this page

The dembow, as it plays above at 90 BPM: a kick on every beat and a snare on the “a” of one, the “and” of two, the “a” of three and the “and” of four (count 1 e & a). Take the first kick and the two snares of each half bar and you get 3+3+2 sixteenths, 500, 500 and 333 ms apart at 90: the tresillo the Cuban habanera already had. Straight 8th hats count it out. Real tracks lay a rimshot, congas, timbales or a güiro on top; take the snare figure away and it stops being reggaeton.

On this page: the app's Dry kit at 90 BPM, straight 16ths.

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
• Pop: 80–104 BPM
• Afrobeats: 100–115 BPM

All twenty genres on one axis, with 90 BPM marked: the BPM chart.

What BPM is reggaeton? The number by style

Classic reggaeton sits at 88 to 96 BPM. The global hits since 2017 run from 89 to about 105, and a newer, faster strain goes past 110. Below 85 the dembow drags; above about 105 it stops bouncing and starts to run, unless the track is counted at half time. Tempos below are as Dave Tompkins' DJ library lists them (a DJ's catalogue hosted at the University of Waterloo, tempos measured with MixMeister; checked October 2026), unless another source is named. The pad above counts 87 to 93 as reggaeton, the ground both sources share; a track at 94 to 100 reads as faster, and that is still classic reggaeton.

Is “Dákiti” reggaeton? Yes: a dembow at about 110, faster than the classic 88 to 96. The faster tracks have no settled name of their own; a Reddit thread on r/Reggaeton asks exactly that about “Dákiti”, and the answers come down to faster reggaeton. The 130 BPM “reggaeton” running playlists on Spotify mix Dominican dembow (El Alfa, Chimbala) with house and EDM remixes such as Tiësto’s “Provenza”: at 130, little of it is reggaeton.

Why song sites say 96 or 192

Song databases often list reggaeton at double. jog.fm puts Wisin & Yandel’s “Rakata” at 192 and Don Omar’s “Hasta Abajo” at 190; Tunebat has J Balvin’s “Reggaeton” (2018) at 176. Those are 96, 95 and 88 counted on every 8th note, which suits a running cadence of about 180 steps a minute and nothing else. A reggaeton track has a kick on every beat: count the kicks, and that is the tempo. Tap them on the pad above; six taps are enough.

Reggaeton drum pattern and drum kit

1. Set the project to 90 to 96 BPM, one bar of 16 steps.
2. Kick on steps 1, 5, 9 and 13: every beat.
3. Snare or clap on steps 4, 7, 12 and 15. Layer a rimshot on the same steps for the crack.
4. Hats or a shaker on the 8ths; an open hat on the “and” of two and four adds air.
5. Loop it. If kick, snare and hat don’t bounce on their own, more layers won’t save it. Then congas on the offbeats, a timbale fill every fourth bar, a sub or an 808 on the root under the kick.

Some guides write the dembow with the kick on one and three only, a snare on two and four and the extra hits on steps 7 and 15. That is a variation. The classic loop keeps the kick on all four beats and the snare off them.

Reggaeton drum kit

A reggaeton drum kit is mostly this: a short punchy kick, a snare or clap with a sharp attack, a rimshot, timbales, congas, a güiro or shaker, and an 808 or sub for the bass. This page has no kit to download; the groove above plays on the Brumm app’s Dry kit, and any kit with those sounds plays the pattern.

Dembow BPM and where the dembow comes from

The dembow under reggaeton runs at the genre’s 88 to 100; Dominican dembow, a genre of its own, runs faster, mostly 115 to 130 (El Alfa). The rhythm is Jamaican. Shabba Ranks’ “Dem Bow” (1990) ran on a riddim from the production duo Steely & Clevie, and the song’s name stuck to the beat. In Panama, reggae en español (El General, Nando Boom) had put Spanish over dancehall in the 1980s. In Puerto Rico in the 1990s, DJ Playero’s and DJ Nelson’s underground tapes put it together with hip-hop; Daddy Yankee, Tego Calderón and Don Omar carried it out. “Gasolina” took it worldwide in 2004, and “Despacito” spent 16 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2017. A US lawsuit by Cleveland “Clevie” Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson over their 1989 track “Fish Market”, covering some 1,800 reggaeton recordings, was still in court in September 2026 (Orphiq, 2026).

Reggaeton BPM next to dancehall, reggae and trap

Dancehall, the dembow’s parent, mostly runs 90 to 110 BPM, often with a sparser kick. Reggae is slower, about 60 to 90, with the weight on the third beat. Hip hop shares reggaeton’s 85 to 95, which is why the two blend so easily; afrobeats sits just above, at 100 to 115. A DJ going from reggaeton at 94 into afrobeats at 104 needs +10.6 % (104/94 = 1.106): past a turntable’s ±8 % and a CDJ’s default ±10 %, so it takes the CDJ’s ±16 % range, a cut or a drop.

Reggaeton key and chords

Most reggaeton hits sit in a minor key over a loop of four chords. “Despacito” is in B minor, on Bm–G–D–A; the same i–VI–III–VII in A minor is Am–F–C–G, the descending i–VII–VI–V, Am–G–F–E in A minor, is the other common loop, and a two-chord vamp, i–VII, covers a lot of the rest. Tune the sub or the 808 to the root: B1 is 61.7 Hz, A1 55 Hz (808 tuner). At 90 BPM a dotted 8th delay, the usual one on vocal ad-libs, is 500 ms; at 96 it is 469 ms.

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.