BPM to ms: delay times for any tempo

Divide 60,000 by the tempo. There are 60,000 milliseconds in a minute, and BPM counts beats in a minute, so 60000 / 120 = 500 ms per beat at 120 BPM. Every other note value is a fraction or a multiple of that: an eighth is half a beat, a sixteenth is a quarter of one, and a bar of 4/4 is four.

500 ms exactly. A 1/8 note is 250 ms, a dotted 1/8 is 375 ms, a 1/8 triplet is 166.7 ms and a 1/16 is 125 ms. Those are the numbers most people are checking when they land here, and the table above gives the same set at whatever tempo you type.

A dot adds half the note's own length back on, so a dotted value is 1.5 times the plain one: a dotted 1/8 is a 1/8 plus a 1/16. A triplet squeezes three notes into the space of two, so it is two-thirds of the plain value. Getting these two the wrong way round is the most common error in a hand-made delay chart — the dotted value is always longer than the plain note, the triplet always shorter.

Because it lands between the beats instead of on them. A 1/8 delay doubles what you already played; a dotted 1/8 repeat falls three sixteenths later, so it weaves through the part and fills the gaps rather than thickening it. It is the sound on a great deal of stadium rock guitar and most trance leads.

Pre-delay is the gap before the reverb starts, and tying it to the tempo keeps the tail from smearing the next hit. Short note values are the useful end: a 1/32 or 1/64 at your tempo pushes the reverb just far enough back that the dry sound stays clear. The same table gives them — read the short rows rather than the long ones.

The same duration read as a rate — 1000 divided by the milliseconds. A plug-in whose LFO is set in hertz rather than in note values needs it: a 1/4 note at 120 BPM is 500 ms, which is 2 Hz, so an auto-pan or a tremolo at 2 Hz is locked to the beat. Switch the table to Hertz to read the whole set that way.

Not for the note values. A 1/8 note is the same length in 4/4, 3/4 and 7/8, because a note value is defined against the whole note and not against the bar. Only the bar length changes, which is why the one figure on this page that assumes 4/4 says so. Compound meters counted in dotted quarters, like 6/8, are the exception: there the dotted rows are the ones you want.

Then it cannot be calculated — it has to be measured from the recording. Upload the MP3 or WAV to our BPM finder and ChordSonic's pipeline reads the tempo out of the audio itself, no track name to look up. From the result you can come straight back here with the tempo already filled in. If you only have the song playing in the room, tap it out instead.

Completely. It runs in your browser, there is no account, no upload and no limit. Detecting the tempo of an actual audio file is a separate step and has a free tier of its own.