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Tap tempo: find the BPM of any song

This is a free online tap tempo. Play the song, tap the beat on the Tap button or with your space bar, and read the BPM. The tapper averages the gaps between your taps instead of timing a single one, so the number settles rather than jumping around. Under it sits a BPM calculator that turns that tempo into milliseconds, for a delay pedal or a plugin. No account, no download. It sits alongside the rest of our free guitar tools.

How to find a song's BPM by tapping

1. Play the song

Start the track, the loop or the riff, and listen for a few seconds before you touch anything. You are looking for the pulse you would nod your head to, not the fastest thing you can hear.

2. Tap the beat

Tap the button, or press the space bar, once per beat. Keep the same reference the whole way through, and ride past the fills: a drum fill is where most tap bpm readings go wrong.

3. Read the average

The large figure is your tempo in beats per minute. It updates on every tap, and the counter next to it tells you how many taps have gone into it so far.

That average is the whole point of a tempo tapper. A single gap between two taps is a measurement of your reflexes as much as of the music, and it can be ten BPM out on its own. This tool keeps a window of your last eight gaps and averages them, so one late tap moves the figure a little instead of ruining it. The smoothing field holds that window size, and it accepts anything from two to thirty-two: raise it for a loose, swung or live groove, lower it if you want the reading to react faster.

Press Reset when you change song, so the new taps are not averaged with the old ones. The tool also clears itself if you stop tapping for more than a couple of seconds, which means you can simply pause and start again. The Copy BPM button puts the figure on your clipboard, ready for a pedal, a sequencer or a note to yourself.

BPM to milliseconds: delay and note values

A tempo is a speed, and a delay pedal asks for a time. The BPM calculator under the tapper does that conversion. Type a tempo, or let your taps fill it in on their own, pick a note value, and read the delay time in milliseconds. It is the quickest way to set an echo that falls in time with the song, and it works just as well for an arpeggiator, a tremolo or a reverb pre-delay.

One formula sits under all of it. A quarter note lasts 60000 / BPM milliseconds, because there are 60000 milliseconds in a minute and the tempo says how many beats fit into it. At 120 BPM that is 500 ms. Everything else is that figure divided or multiplied: halve it for an eighth note, quarter it for a sixteenth, multiply by 1.5 for a dotted quarter, by two thirds for a triplet.

Note value Formula Example at 120 BPM
Quarter note 60000 / BPM 500 ms
Eighth note 60000 / (BPM × 2) 250 ms
Sixteenth note 60000 / (BPM × 4) 125 ms
Dotted quarter (60000 / BPM) × 1.5 750 ms
Dotted eighth (60000 / BPM) × 0.75 375 ms

The full table in the tool carries the two triplet values as well. Reading it is a matter of picking the figure you want to hear: a quarter note delay answers on every beat, an eighth note delay fills the gaps, a sixteenth turns into a texture rather than an echo.

The dotted eighth is the one worth knowing. It lands 375 ms behind the note at 120 BPM, which is three quarters of a beat, so the repeat never falls on a beat of its own. Played against straight eighths it weaves between them, and that is the rhythmic delay sound you have heard on a hundred records.

Tapped unit: quarter note or whole bar

The tapped unit tells the tool what your taps mean. It assumes a quarter note, one tap per beat, which is what you want almost every time. The other settings exist for the cases where one tap per beat is awkward.

Tap each beat

Leave the unit on quarter note. Your taps and the beats are the same thing, and the figure you read is the tempo as a musician would quote it. Use this unless the song fights you.

Eighth note and half note are there for the two near misses: if the song is slow enough that you find yourself tapping twice per beat, choose eighth note, and if you have been tapping every other beat, choose half note. In both cases the tool corrects the figure instead of leaving you with double or half the tempo.

Tap once per bar

Choose the bar setting and tap once at the start of each bar. The tool multiplies by four, because it assumes 4/4, and gives you the tempo in beats per minute anyway.

This is for fast music, where tapping every beat turns into a drum roll and your own unevenness swamps the reading. It is also useful when the beat is hard to place but the bar is obvious, which happens often with a strong one on the downbeat. It needs more taps to settle, since each one covers four times as much music.

If your reading comes out at exactly double or exactly half what you expected, the unit is almost always the reason. Either change it, or reset and tap again against the pulse you meant.

Common tempo ranges

Rough ranges, nothing more. They are worth knowing because they tell you when a reading is suspicious: a rock song that comes out at 65 BPM has probably been tapped every other beat. Plenty of songs sit outside their style's range, so trust what you tapped over what you read here.

Style Usual range What to watch
Ballad 60 to 76 BPM The beat feels wide. It is easy to tap half as fast as the song without noticing.
Hip-hop 85 to 100 BPM Tap the main beat, not the hi-hat, or you will read twice the tempo.
Pop 100 to 130 BPM The most crowded range on this list, and the one where tapping is quickest.
Rock 100 to 140 BPM The snare on beats two and four is the easiest thing to follow.
Punk and metal 160 BPM and up Fast enough that tapping one beat per bar is often steadier than tapping every beat.
Drum and bass 170 to 180 BPM Many people feel it at half that speed. Both readings are defensible, so pick one and stay with it.

Largo to Presto: what the Italian words mean in BPM

Printed music often gives the tempo as an Italian word rather than a number. These are the usual zones, and they are worth having beside a tapper for the opposite reason to the table above: here you already know the word and want the figure.

Marking BPM zone Character
Largo 40 to 60 BPM Broad and spacious
Adagio 66 to 76 BPM Slow, expressive
Andante 76 to 108 BPM Walking pace
Moderato 108 to 120 BPM Moderate
Allegro 120 to 168 BPM Fast, cheerful
Presto 168 to 200 BPM Very fast

The edges overlap on purpose, because the words describe a character as much as a speed. Vivace sits between Allegro and Presto, Grave below Largo, and Prestissimo above everything. A piece marked Andante played at the bottom of its zone and the top of it is recognizably the same piece, which is the whole reason composers wrote a word instead of a number.

From tap tempo to practice

Finding the tempo is the easy half. Holding it while you play is the half that takes work, and that is a metronome's job rather than a tapper's. Ours is here in English: the online metronome takes the figure you just tapped and holds it, with subdivisions, accents and a visual mode.

In the meantime, the practical use of the figure you just tapped is to aim below it. Work a difficult bar ten or twenty BPM under the real tempo until it is clean, then climb back. A passage that falls apart at full speed is almost never a speed problem, it is an accuracy problem that speed exposes.

The tempo is also only half of what your strumming hand needs. Which strokes land where is the other half, and our eight guitar strumming patterns are written out on an eighth-note grid, easiest first, so you can put one of them under the tempo you just measured. If the figure you tapped is simply faster than your hand goes today, how long it takes to learn guitar sets out what arrives when, milestone by milestone, instead of leaving you to guess whether you are behind.

The other tool that is already here in English is the online guitar tuner. Tune first, set the tempo second, then play. In that order, because a guitar that is out of tune makes everything else sound like your fault.

Frequently asked questions

How many taps do I need?
Four gives you a usable figure, and eight to sixteen gives you a figure you can trust. The tool averages the gaps between your taps rather than timing a single one, so every extra tap pulls the reading closer to the real tempo. The smoothing field sets how many gaps go into that average: it starts at eight and accepts anything from two to thirty-two.
Why does the reading drift while I keep tapping?
Because the average follows a moving window. Once you pass the smoothing size, each new tap pushes the oldest gap out, so the number tracks how you are tapping now rather than how you started. Human tapping is never perfectly even either, so a movement of one BPM either way is normal. If the figure keeps climbing or falling, you are speeding up or slowing down against the song. Raise the smoothing, or set the rounding to Integer so that small movement stops showing.
Can I use my keyboard?
Yes. The space bar taps, exactly like the Tap button, and it is the steadier of the two on a computer. Holding the key down does nothing: a held key would fire a tap every few thousandths of a second and produce a nonsense tempo, so only real presses count. Typing in the BPM field is safe, because taps are ignored while you are in a text field. On a phone, tap the button with your finger instead.
What is the difference between a tap tempo and a metronome?
A tap tempo measures a tempo you already hear. A metronome plays a tempo you have chosen. You use the first to find out that a song sits at 112 BPM, and the second to hold 112 BPM while you play it. The two are the same number seen from opposite sides, which is why a tap metronome usually means a metronome with a tap button bolted on.
Does it find the BPM of a song by name?
No, and it is worth being plain about it. There is no database of songs here and nothing to search. The page does not look songs up, you tap them: play the track, tap along with the beat, and read the average. That is slower than a lookup for a famous song, and more reliable for anything live, swung or played by humans, because you choose which pulse you are measuring.

Who made this

Guitar Social Club is the work of Yohann Abbou, a guitar teacher in Paris. He teaches adults, which shapes everything here: people with jobs, limited practice time and a clear idea of the songs they want to play. The tools come out of his lessons, which is why none of them asks you to sign up before it works, and why this one shows you an average rather than a single guess. The rest of our free guitar tools work the same way. There is more on who he is and why this site exists in about Guitar Social Club.