BPMer - get music tempo

If you are a musician, dancer or music lover, you may need to define a tempo of the songs you want to use at your sessions, lessons or music collection. Modern software may help you in case of obvious rhythms, but often make mistakes when rhythm is specific. / For example, in swing, afro or oriental music. /

That's where music BPM tap counters come to the forefront. BPMer is one of them. Its' work basics are user-friendly & easy to understand, but you can find instructions below.

I hope you enjoy it & wish you only the best music in your life!

How to count music tempo?

First of all, set it up:

• Select right signature — it will change the counter view for better results check. Almost all modern popular music has 4/4 signature, which is set by default;
• Choose measurement — usually music tempo is measured in beats per minute (BPM), but you can also get a number of bars per minute.
• Select an interval for your taps — you can tap on every beat or every second / upbeat/downbeat /, third / oh, hi there, classic music fans! /, fourth / bar starters /, fifth / hm... that's unique one! /, eights / music is so fast, you can tap only on phrase/eight starters / or sixteenth / why not, really?! / beat.

With selected interval tap by clicking the "Tap" button or pressing any key. I recommend you to do 35+ taps for correct results. After counting a song or in case of mistake you can reset everything by clicking the "Reset" button and start over again.

You can validate results by circles. They will continue their "run" after you've done tapping. You can change results manually and check your value the same way.

After you've done you can copy the results by clicking on the particular icon.

Music tempo — dictionary

Disclaimer: following descriptions are written for the case of the most popular 4/4 music signature. If you use another one, you probably already know what the beats, bars and phrases are. Otherwise I recommend you to google it.

• Beat is the unit of music measurement. For example, when dancers count music as "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8" every number is related to one beat.
• Upbeats and downbeats — every second beat. Upbeats are odd (1, 3, 5, 7), downbeats are even (2, 4, 6, 8).
• Bars is another unit of music measurement. One bar consists of 4 beats and starts with the upbeat. When dancers count the music, they usually have two bars in it: "1, 2, 3, 4" and "5, 6, 7, 8".
• Eights — commonly used terminology of the unit that contains two bars. Musicians often call it "musical phrase". When dancers count the music, they usually use whole eight: "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8".
• Beats per minute or BPM is the most famous unit of counting the musical tempo. It shows how many beats are there in one minute of time.
• Bars per minute is the unit of music tempo measurement that is used within some dance communities (for example, in Boogie Woogie). One bar contains 4 beats, that's why 1 bar per minute = 4 beats per minute.

About me

Hi there! My name is akamych or Alexey Kalinin if you like. I'm an experienced swing dance teacher and fullstack developer currently located in Moscow, Russia. You can check out and participate in my projects at akamych.com or contact me.

BPMer is the project that was used for my own purposes to practice and teach dancing for a long time.