Trance BPM

How fast, and who says so

Where the two sources overlap: 130–150 BPM. Each in its own words:

• Wikipedia, Trance music: 120–150 BPM
• Native Instruments, What is trance music? (2023): 130–150 BPM

The groove on this page

Trance runs on a four-on-the-floor kick with the bass on the offbeat: one short note between every pair of kicks, so kick and bass alternate and the low end never stops. Above it the 16th hats are straight, without swing, and the long breakdowns drop the kick entirely before it comes back. The groove here plays at 138, the tempo most people mean when they say trance; the range runs from about 125 for deep and hypnotic trance to 150 for hard trance.

On this page: the app's Bright kit at 138 BPM, straight 16ths, with the Rubber band sound.

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

• Techno: 125–135 BPM
• Dubstep: 135–142 BPM
• Breakbeat: 110–175 BPM
• Psytrance: 138–148 BPM

All twenty genres on one axis, with 138 BPM marked: the BPM chart.

Trance BPM by subgenre

Track tempos 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. Mixes of one record differ, so the version matters.

Classictrance.com and bpmcalc both put uplifting trance at 138 to 142. Past 150 it is psytrance’s faster branches: darkpsy around 145 to 160 (“between 145 and 160 as a rule of thumb”, r/psytrance) and hi-tech at 160 to 200 and up (psytrance BPM). The pad above counts 130 to 150 as trance, where Wikipedia and Native Instruments overlap; a progressive track at 128 reads as just below it. Some tempo guides get “Children” wrong: one files it with Balearic tracks at 118 to 128, another gives 134. The four-minute single edit runs at 137.

Why 138?

138 is where the classic, uplifting sound settled at the end of the 1990s: fast enough that a 16th-note arpeggio steps every 109 ms and rolls, and well clear of house at 120 to 128. When EDM pulled the main stages toward 128 in the 2010s, Armin van Buuren started a label named after the number, Who’s Afraid Of 138?!. To check a track by ear: 23 kicks in ten seconds is 138, 21 is 126, 25 is 150.

Trance vs house vs techno

Tempo alone won’t tell them apart: all three meet around 128 to 130. House (115 to 130 on these pages) is built on groove and swing, techno (125 to 135) on repetition and texture, trance on melody and the breakdown: the drums go for 16 or 32 bars, a lead or a pad holds the room, and the kick comes back on the climax. A 128 BPM track with a supersaw lead and a long breakdown is progressive trance; the same tempo with a disco loop is house. Mixing from house at 128 into trance at 138 takes +7.8 % (138/128 = 1.078): just inside a turntable’s ±8 % and a CDJ’s default ±10 %, with the fader near its end, so most DJs step up through a few records instead.

Is trance EDM?

EDM is the umbrella for electronic dance music, and trance is one genre under it. In the US, since the 2010s, “EDM” also names the festival big-room sound at 128, which is the tempo that label of Armin’s was named against.

Where trance comes from

Frankfurt, around 1990: Dance 2 Trance’s “We Came in Peace” (1990) and Jam & Spoon’s 1992 remix of Age of Love’s “The Age of Love”, around Sven Väth’s club Omen and his labels Eye Q and Harthouse. Goa trance grew on the beaches of India at the same time and turned into psytrance. The Dutch and the British made it a stadium sound at the end of the decade: Tiësto, Ferry Corsten, Armin van Buuren, whose radio show A State of Trance first aired in 2001. Beatport split trance into two charts in May 2023, Trance (Main Floor) and Trance (Raw / Deep / Hypnotic) (Orphiq, 2026).

If you searched for the Metro Boomin, Travis Scott and Young Thug song “Trance” (Heroes & Villains, 2022): it is a rap track, not trance music. Tap it on the pad above for its tempo.

Then make something of it

The door opens Brumm at the tempo on screen, with the swing off, and the app names the tempo once on its start screen. Its range is 90 to 150 BPM, which covers every trance tempo, hard trance at 150 included; a tempo above 150 goes in at half, never below 90. 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.