How to Determine Beats Per Minute in a Song

Video Transcript

What's up? This is DJ Colione on behalf of expertvillage.com and in this clip I am going to show you the basics to BPM counting. So what is important is to understand first I guess how most hip hop songs and pop songs are counted they are counted in 8 counts and typically a chorus is 4/8's and reverse is 8/8's. So it is really important to know if you don't know how to count music is how the story of a song goes so you can manipulate it to your advantage. So what we are going to do is we are going to count four 8 counts of a song to figure out the BPM of it. So what we need to do is a little equation. The equation is you take 32 beats because it is four 8 counts; that's 32 beats. You divide it by the length and seconds it takes to get to those 32 beats. From that you multiply that number by 60 to get BPM. So what we are going to do is an example on this record right here so I can show you how it is done. First things first, make sure your pitch is at 0. You don't want to have your pitch at +8 and you are trying to BPM all your records and you get an off rate. So put this to 0, your pitch control or reset it to 0 whichever way is best. Play a record. Now the most important thing is you want to start the watch on a 1 and end on a 1. I used to start on1's and end on 8 because I thought it was the end of the 8 count and it would mess everything up. So you want to start on a 1 and end on a 1, four 8 counts later. So we are going to do that. We are going to use the trusty IPOD stop watch. So we are going to listen 5, 6, 7, 8 start; 7, 8, 1 8 count, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; that's two 8 counts. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; that's three 8 counts. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1 and we stop right on the 1. So the number we got was 19.05. So if you take 19.05 seconds, you want to take 32 divided by that, multiply that by 60 and what you get is 100.32 BPM's. So now we know that this song right here which is Diddy by P. Diddy is a 100 BPM's. Now from that it is really going to be helpful to organize all of your records by BPM so you are not trying to mix something that is a 120 with something that is 87. It is going to be impossible to even match. This for one helps you organize all your crates worth of records and it sort of opens up possibilities for different mixes and different things you can do.

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