Beats Per Minute

with industry Pro, Nick Batzdorf

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Merryband1
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Beats Per Minute

Post by Merryband1 » Wed Dec 19, 2018 12:17 pm

I just posted a link to this site on the General Hangout under 4:30 AM and a Tip, but in case people don't see that, I thought I'd post a link here, too. While I was looking to find out how many beats per minute were in a song reference for one of the listings, I found:

Song BPM.

You only have to enter a composer or performer name and the title of the song, and, if they've analyzed it already, it'll tell you how many beats per minute that particular recording has. (Sometimes groups will do more than one version. I found three or four for the Chieftains doing a version of Cancion Mixteca, for example. Unfortunately, it hadn't analyzed the two groups that were listed in the references, but, hey, at least it's a ballpark figure.)

When writing to the listing, and you suspect a song supervisor wants something in the same tempo as the reference track, now you can get a clue how fast or slow to set your metronome in your DAW or composing software.

Hope you find this as helpful as I think I'm going to!

Merry

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Re: Beats Per Minute

Post by marcblack30 » Wed Dec 19, 2018 1:55 pm

I use this tap for BPM tool all the time to find tempos. Just tap along!
https://www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm

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Re: Beats Per Minute

Post by VanderBoegh » Wed Dec 19, 2018 5:13 pm

I use this tap for BPM tool all the time to find tempos. Just tap along!
That's the same BPM tapper website I use all the time too, Mark. I've got it bookmarked in Safari cuz I use it so often.

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Re: Beats Per Minute

Post by Merryband1 » Wed Dec 19, 2018 5:51 pm

Thanks, Marc & Matt! I'll give that site a try, too! I want to get the tempo for the submission just right! :)

Merry

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Re: Beats Per Minute

Post by Casey H » Wed Dec 19, 2018 6:07 pm

That songbpm site seems a bit inaccurate from the few songs I tried. The Beatles Let It Be shows as 143. Even assuming it's off by a factor of 2, that would be 71.5 which is a bit fast for the song. I think it's more like 66. That being said, for most of our purposes, this doesn't have to be perfect. :D

BTW, if you have the mp3 or wav for a song, this free program is pretty good at giving you it's BPM...
https://download.cnet.com/MixMeister-BP ... 90906.html

With any BPM analyzer, sometimes you have to adjust by a factor of 2.

:D Casey

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Re: Beats Per Minute

Post by VanderBoegh » Thu Dec 20, 2018 10:45 am

I think you guys may be overcomplicating the process. Really, just load up this website: https://www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm then hit the space bar along with the beat as the music plays. Just do that for about 5 seconds. That's all you need to do!

And sometimes there's wiggle room in BPM in regards to the reference tracks. Sometimes, libraries are just looking to build their catalog of music, and just need something in the same vein - which implies a relatively close'ish BPM to the reference tracks, probably within about 7-8 BPM on either side.

However, there are plenty of times where a temp track has already been placed in a scene or commercial and the video has been edited to the beat of the music. In those cases, you have to compose to the EXACT BPM of the ref track, otherwise the music won't match up to the editing.

Lastly, some styles of music have pretty strict tempo guidelines that it doesn't make sense to deviate from. For example, EDM hits either 128 or 126 BPM. Dubstep (does anyone still make this anymore?) is nearly always 140. Modern trap hip hop music is typically around 70'ish. Old school hip hop is around 90. This is where it pays to know your styles inside & out!

~~Matt

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Re: Beats Per Minute

Post by Merryband1 » Sat Dec 22, 2018 2:26 pm

All great replies & Ideas. Thanks, guys!

I'm wanting to know for one of those direct-to-supervisor listings, so they may have already filmed & edited to a track. However, if that's the case, it's confusing, because the first reference track is in 4/4, and the other two are in 3/4. :?: I plan to do one of each, just in case. 8-)

Merry

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Re: Beats Per Minute

Post by OwenGrech » Sun Nov 06, 2022 9:47 pm

.........and this is precisely why ML's point on the usefulness of a forum like this versus social media is spot on!
I am educating myself on Hip Hop and was wondering about where to best start with regards to bpm, just a quick search and I found this post by MVB which explains that nicely so yeah thanks from 2022 :)

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Re: Beats Per Minute

Post by audiogust » Wed Nov 09, 2022 5:46 pm

That site works great. You can also just Google it and it will usually show up as one of the default answers in the "People ask" section at the top, or it will show you a long list of sites that offer BPM as a service for songs. The nice thing is that Google is more likely to show you results if the song is a bit obscure since it will show you results from sites that actually list the song.

For those of you using Windows (or Edge) Bing will also give you these results. In fact, you can usually just enter "<song name> bpm" in the address bar to get the result from Chrome or Edge.

-Chris
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