Tap tempo

How to tap tempo and find the BPM of a song

Play the song and listen for a bar first, so you follow the beat instead of chasing it. Then tap the pad once on every beat: the pulse you would nod your head to, not every drum hit. On a laptop, Space, Enter or T taps too. The BPM appears from the second tap and follows your last four gaps, so it moves if the song speeds up. Eight dots fill; from the eighth tap the average over every tap and your steadiness show under the pad.

Stop tapping and the count closes after about two beats of silence, a second at 120 BPM. The click then plays your tempo for two bars, higher on the first of every four clicks, so you can hear it against the song; Click along keeps it going like a tap tempo metronome until you stop it. Under eight taps there is no click yet: the pad asks for more, and a tap within two or three seconds carries the count on. After a result, a new tap, or Tap again, starts a fresh count. No microphone opens and nothing is recorded: this tempo counter only times your taps. It runs in the browser, so there is no app to install. To let the phone listen to the music instead, use the BPM counter; for a metronome with beats per bar and subdivisions, the online metronome has its own Tap button.

Half time or double time? Check the number against the genre

A tapped number is right, half or double: tap every other beat and you get half, tap the hi-hats and you get double, and after a count the tool names both. Then find your genre below. A house track that reads 62 is a 124 track tapped on every other kick; dubstep or trap that reads 70 is 140 felt in half time, with the snare on beat three; drum and bass at 87 is 174. Each genre's page gives its sources and plays a groove at that tempo. All twenty on one axis, with your tempo marked: the BPM chart.

What to do with the BPM: the DAW, the decks, delay times in ms

Type it into your DAW's tempo field so loops and the grid line up with the song. Behind the decks, the gap between two tracks' BPM is how far one has to be pitched to mix them: 124 into 128 is 3.2 %, easy on a pitch fader, but about half a semitone if the key isn't locked. Under the pad the number turns into milliseconds: Delay gives the echo for each note value, straight, dotted and triplet; Pre-delay the gap before a reverb starts; LFO the rate in Hz for a filter or tremolo; Gate the length of one chopped step. The rule behind them: a quarter note lasts 60,000 ÷ BPM milliseconds, 500 ms at 120; an eighth is half of that, a dotted note one and a half times, a triplet two thirds.

Is tap tempo the same as BPM?

No. BPM, beats per minute, is the measure; tap tempo is one way to get it, by tapping along and timing the gaps. One gap of 500 ms is 60,000 ÷ 500 = 120 BPM. The same counting works for anything with a steady beat, a pulse or a runner's steps included. In a DAW or on a pedal, tap tempo is the button that sets the tempo from your taps instead of a number you type.

How accurate is tap tempo, and how many taps does it take?

Two taps give a first number, and it jumps. The average gets better the longer you tap, for a simple reason: the mean of all your gaps is the time from your first tap to your last, divided by the number of gaps. Only the first and the last tap's errors are left, spread over the whole span, so the error is roughly your wobble divided by how long you tapped.

What counts is the time you tap, not the count: at 174 BPM eight taps take only 2.4 s and leave about ±2 BPM, so tap fast tempos for as long as slow ones. The table assumes each tap is off the beat by about 20 ms on average and that you don't drift; your gaps then vary by about 28 ms, which is the wobble the tool shows after a count. Twice that wobble, twice the error. Steadiness puts it on a scale: 100 % when your gaps vary by 2 % of a beat or less, 0 % at 12 % or more. Anything that delays every tap by the same amount leaves the tempo alone: Bluetooth headphones, a screen's touch delay, or the habit most people have of tapping slightly ahead of the beat (the negative mean asynchrony in Bruno Repp's review of tapping research, 2005). For a tenth of a BPM, tap for half a minute, or let the BPM counter read the audio.

Without a screen: count the beats for 15 seconds and multiply by four; one miscounted beat is 4 BPM off, so it is a sanity check, not a measurement. Tap with one finger and the same motion every time: alternating hands tends to make the gaps long, short, long.

Check yourself on a song you know

Songs made on a drum machine or to a click hold one tempo, so they make good practice: Daft Punk, "Get Lucky", 116 BPM; Michael Jackson, "Billie Jean", 117; Daft Punk, "Around the World", 121, and "One More Time", 123 (the album version); The Weeknd, "Blinding Lights", about 171, often tapped as 85 because the snare falls on every other beat. The tempos come from Dave Tompkins' hand-tapped music database at the University of Waterloo and from the published sheet music, as of 2026.

How to tap tempo in 3/4, 6/8 and other time signatures

BPM counts beats, not bars, so the time signature doesn't change how you tap: tap the beat you feel. In 3/4, tap all three beats of the bar; a slow waltz sits around 84 to 90 BPM and a Viennese waltz around 174 to 180 (the World DanceSport Federation's 28 to 30 and 58 to 60 bars a minute). In 6/8 most people feel two beats per bar, each a dotted quarter: tap those, and if you tapped all six eighths instead, divide by three. Logic and Ableton count tempo in quarter notes even in 6/8: a dotted-quarter pulse of 60 goes into the tempo field as 90 (60 × 1.5). If you tapped only the first beat of each bar, you counted bars per minute: multiply by the beats in a bar, by four in 4/4. In 5/4 or 7/8, tap the quarters or eighths evenly and ignore the grouping; the counter doesn't need to know where the bar starts.

Tap tempo in Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Pro Tools and FL Studio

The quickest way in any DAW is to tap here and type the number into the project tempo. To tap inside the software:

How to tap tempo in Logic Pro

Yes: Logic sets the tempo from taps with its Tap Tempo key command. In File > Project Settings > Synchronization > General, set Sync Mode to Manual, or leave "Auto enable external sync" on (the default). Give Tap Tempo a key in the Key Commands window (Option-K) if it has none, and tap that key on the beat; Logic follows. Edit > Tempo > Tempo Interpreter sets what one tap counts as (a quarter note usually works) and how quickly Logic follows. Logic can also detect the tempo of a recording by itself with Smart Tempo (since Logic Pro X 10.4, 2018): set the project tempo mode to Adapt in File > Project Settings > Smart Tempo and import the file; in the Smart Tempo Editor, the keys T and D tap the beat and the downbeat as hints when its reading is off.

How to tap tempo in Ableton Live

Click the TAP button left of the tempo in the Control Bar once per beat; the more taps, the more precise. To tap with a key, press Cmd-K (Ctrl-K on Windows), click TAP, press your key, and press Cmd-K or Ctrl-K again. That is what Ctrl+K does in Live: it switches Key Map Mode on and off. Cmd-M or Ctrl-M maps TAP to a MIDI pad or a footswitch the same way. With "Start Playback with Tap Tempo" on in the Record, Warp & Launch settings, Live starts playing after four taps in 4/4, at the tapped tempo.

Pro Tools tap tempo

Show the MIDI Controls in the Transport window and switch the Conductor off, so the tempo is manual. Click the tempo number, tap the T key on the beat, and press Enter to keep it; Pro Tools averages your last eight taps. To tap from a MIDI pad or key instead, turn on Use MIDI to Tap Tempo in Setup > Preferences > MIDI, then tap with the tempo field selected.

FL Studio tap tempo

Right-click the tempo display in the toolbar and choose Tap, then click the tap icon on the beat; the tempo follows from the second tap. Turn Sync off in the Tap window, and you can drop an unsynced audio clip into the Playlist and tap along to find its tempo without FL repitching anything.

Tap tempo on a delay pedal

On a delay or tremolo pedal, tap tempo is a footswitch: you stamp it on the beat, the pedal measures the gaps and sets its time, usually one quarter note per tap, with a switch or menu for eighths, dotted eighths or triplets. Pedals without one on board often take a separate tap tempo pedal at a jack; it has to be a momentary switch, and some want a particular polarity, which their manual names. If a pedal takes its time in ms, tap here and read it off the Delay table: at 120 BPM a quarter is 500 ms and the dotted eighth, the echo that falls between the beats, 375 ms.

Alex Guaraldi, who designs pedals at CopperSound, argued in Premier Guitar (2024) that a foot rarely taps the band's exact tempo. The numbers show where that matters. Tap 121.3 against a drummer on a click at 120, and the quarter-note delay is 494.6 ms instead of 500: each echo comes 5.4 ms too soon, and the error adds up with each repeat, so the fourth is about 21 ms early, which nobody hears under a lead line. A tremolo or a free-running LFO is different, because it keeps cycling: 1.3 BPM fast, it slips a whole beat ahead of the band in about 46 seconds. Where the pulse has to stay locked, tap longer, type the ms, or send the pedal MIDI clock.

Tap tempo or a BPM detector?

Tapping needs only your ears, so it works on a car radio, a band in the next room, a record, a video, or a beat you haven't made yet. It also copes with live, rubato or drumless music that trips detectors, because you decide where the beat is. An automatic detector is better when the beat is clear and you want a tenth of a BPM without the effort: the BPM counter listens through the microphone or reads a file in the browser. For mixing two tracks in key as well as in tempo, the DJ tools have the Camelot wheel.

Tempo markings in BPM

Sheet music often gives an Italian word instead of a number. The usual ranges: largo 40 to 60 BPM, adagio 66 to 76, andante 76 to 108 (a walking pace), moderato 108 to 120, allegro 120 to 156, vivace 156 to 176, presto 168 to 200. They overlap and are conventions, not rules. Tap a recording, then find its word; the metronome sets each one with a tap.

Then make something of it

The door opens Brumm, a club track with a beat and a bass, with your tempo in it as a bass note on every beat, halved or doubled into the app's 90 to 150 BPM. No account, no upload: the tempo travels inside the link itself. Hum a line over it, and it becomes an instrument.

Your taps stay on your phone: the tool counts them in the browser and keeps nothing. How the site counts visits.