BPMs (including a LIST!)

2. I'm excellent at it. I reference the tempo to other things that I know the tempo of. But it's easy to work out anyway - count the beats for fifteen seconds and multiply by four.

There are plugins for Winamp that can measure the tempo if you tap a key to the beat.

Well, there's this thing, which sort of works.

track one: something by Low

I love how Tico Tico had to advertise "people, you get to list stuff".

You have to see a friend's BPM book, in which he has the bpm of every danceable song in his collection in bpm order (the trick he tells is to take the bpm everytime you buy a track otherwise it can be a bit overwhelming). I will steal and destroy his book - or copy it onto this thread.

Silly question, but why do you want to know what the BPM is? I guess I must truly not get dance music.

No, track one is The Orb's "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain ..." which proudly advertised its BPM as 3 BPC = 3 beats per century!

for mac users there's this - you have to tap the mouse as you listen to the track - its pretty good.

and free as well.

Jel,

Most DJs these days are paid by the beat, so more BPM = more $

No, but seriously: BPMs are useful knowledge if you're mixing songs together and want the beats to flow seamlessly: if the BPMs aren't a close match you're going to need to drastically speed up or slow down the new track for a match.

ah, yeah, that makes sense, thanks!

But as far as Tom's proposed list goes: I'm not sure there are well-defined "BPM levels" to aim for. Maybe we should start with, say 40 B.P.M. (Matos' suggestion of something by Low ought to work), and then go up by, I dunno, 5s?

Well, the difference between 40 and 45 bpm is very noticeable, whereas the difference between, say, 150 and 155 would be less obvious.

True, but the 150-155 range is prime dance-music terrain, so it's a meaningful difference maybe? Or the CDR would accelerate subliminally, which could be cool.

Or make it a geometric rather than arithmetic series...

Yes, yes. Please, all of you, get to the list.

I can't ever figure out what the BPM is supposed to be. Take the intro to "Mickey" for instance. Would you tap just on that snare beat, or would you do the bass drum, too?

1. Low - "The Lamb" (40 BPM)

"Mickey" (the Toni Basil one, right?) has the snare on beats 2 and 4, which is really common. But the bass drum isn't precisely on the beats, it's a more complicated pattern.

Do these songs have to keep a consistent tempo throughout the whole song? Slow songs especially tend to let the tempo waver.

with these tap tempo programs, getting the beats correct to +/- one BPM shouldn't be too hard. The problem is in the "extreme" ranges: finding songs with exactly 50, 51, 52 ... BPM is hard, but 120, 121, 122 ... BPM is dead easy.

I used the program from the link posted by Edward, and just pulled random mp3 tracks that were lying around:

117 -- Bjork, Big Time Sensuality (Justin Robertson Mix)
133 -- Green Velvet, Abduction (Surgeon Remix)
90 -- TATU, All the Things She Said
128 -- Basement Jaxx, Where's Your Head At
123 -- Kraftwerk -- The Model

Now get to work, all of you! :-)

Nick Drake's "Road" = 150, but I have a feeling several thousand dance tracks will override any chances of this song ever making the comp :P

95 - "A Fog" by furiousBall

Well I just spent the last 15 minutes browsing through "slow" tracks on CDs I own and being surprised at how few are truly slow when it comes to BPM. It would be easy to get all the slow ones (sub-60 BPM) from classical music, but somehow not in the spirit of the game...

search: Khanate. probably like 2 or 3 bpm, most of the time.

160 is my fav. BPM ever

I'm pretty good at it too, ever since first recording drums for a record to a click track. I still think back to those old songs and say "Well, 60/100/120/etc. bpm is here, and this song I'm listening to is here, so it's probably X."

Average hip-hop bpm=90?

The specific thing was that I was writing the Red Plastic Bag post on NYLPM and was thinking about mentioning the BPMs. But then I decided not to. I don't know how fast most Soca is, it seems pretty fast.

The best program for calculating BPMs is BPMStudio (which is a virtual dj-mixer/mp3-player). Since I have tested almost all of the free ones avaible on the net, I can safely say there is a HUGE difference in accuracy between the commercial and the free ones.
This is not that a big problem if you're just playing around at home, but if you are to use the bpms when playing live I suggest you buy (or download) BPMstudio.

My fave BPM is 127.

Mixmeister (mixmeister.com) is accurate, and worth paying for (USD 49.95) if you want to do cute little mix CDs (I've spent many a happy hour).

Fave BPM is 114 - *the* jazz-funk BPM, closely followed by 129 - *the* 80s hi-energy BPM.

My stepmother's late 3rd husband (James Hamilton of Record Mirror)imported the concept to the UK after an epiphany watching Larry Levan beat-mix at the Paradise Garage - first time he had ever heard it done - and laboriously measured new release BPMs every week from 1978 until a couple of months before his death in 1996. He wanted to be buried with his "clickers", but alas, it never happened...

I used to love those James Hamilton reviews - 'a 113-115-117-113 bpm chicks-cooing, guys-shouting jiggler'. He used to log the tempo changes pre-drum machines and click tracks as well (as suggested in my fictitious example above).

SOCA GOLD 2003 LP:

-A-
1. Invasion feat Fay-Ann Lyons - "Display" .............. 152
2. Bunji Garlin & Shammi - "Soca Bhangra" ............... 156
3. Flo P.G. - "2 Nasty" ................................. 150
4. Suns feat Bunji et al - "By The Bar" ................. 109
5. Denise Belfon & Ghetto Flex - "Wine & Bend Over" ..... 105
6. Rupee - "Tempted To Touch" ........................... 106

-B-
1. Iwer George - "Ah Home" .............................. 148
2. Dawg-E-Slaughter - "Bounce" .......................... 162
3. Krosfyah feat. Edwin Yearwood - "Ride It" ............ 150
4. T.O.K. - "Dom Perignon" .............................. 109
5. Square One feat. Andy Armstrong - "Turn It Up" ....... 124
6. Burning Flames - "Power Drill" ....................... 108

done the Soca LP late at night while tipsy so can't guarantee 100% accuracy

for best results, count entire minute - and remember to start counting with "0" if you're stopping at the same clockmark

Personally I'm always more interested in what key the songs I'm trying to mix are in than the bpm.

Soca has quite a wide BPM range
the slow cuts could mix with some hip hop
while the fastest can easily match drum & bass
in the middle, the Square One cut above is perfect house tempo

Best BPM ever in 168, it's the speed I do most of my jungle tracks in. 160 seems too slow, and 170 is just too fast most of the time. 84 is also good of course.

Second favorite is 145 BTW.

hmmm...
http://www.thebpmbook.com/bpm/

OK, this is the first time I've seen this thread. In order for this to work, you'd have to start somewhere no lower than the high 60s, because below that, music conventionally seems "rhythm-less"...

Also, once you get to higher BPMs like 180 or so, subtle playback speeds on CD players may play something original meant to be 180 BPM as 181 or 182 BPM. The scale of BPM gets far tighter as you go higher.

The mix is still a great idea, if this encompasses as much of music, Western or not, as possible spanning as large a range of time as possible, as this would make a great case study of how rhythms have waxed and waned in various styles over years. (And these songs don't have to be in 4/4 signature either...)

This was mentioned earlier but the MixMeister software is very easy to use. My only wish is that it would automatically add a song's BPM to its file tag.

Trying to calculate the BPM of a song programmatically is like trying to guess the age of a building by looking at it, inside and outside. It's not that easy.. especially if songs are wont to drop beats at times, or double-up, or half-down the beats during bridges, or throw in additional rhythmic samples or what not. It can be done mostly accurately, but you have to tweak a lot of the software's knobs so to speak.

Sure, this may be easy with some Perlon type stuff, but not with most other songs.