BPM to milliseconds
One beat lasts 60,000 ÷ BPM milliseconds. Everything else — delay times, LFO rates, sample lengths — follows from that single division. Convert both ways below.
Quarter note (1 beat)
The standard delay-time setting.
Eighth note
Half a beat — gallops and echoes.
Dotted eighth
The famous dotted-eighth delay feel.
Triplet eighth
A third of a beat — swing's building block.
Sixteenth note
A quarter of a beat.
Whole bar (4/4)
Four quarter notes — loop length in 4/4.
Editing either field updates the other. Values are rounded to the nearest millisecond for display; the table below uses the same rounding.
Reference table, 60–180 BPM
| BPM | Quarter (ms) | Eighth (ms) | Dotted 8th (ms) | Triplet 8th (ms) | 16th (ms) | Bar of 4/4 (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 60 | 1,000 | 500 | 750 | 333 | 250 | 4,000 |
| 65 | 923 | 462 | 692 | 308 | 231 | 3,692 |
| 70 | 857 | 429 | 643 | 286 | 214 | 3,429 |
| 75 | 800 | 400 | 600 | 267 | 200 | 3,200 |
| 80 | 750 | 375 | 563 | 250 | 188 | 3,000 |
| 85 | 706 | 353 | 529 | 235 | 176 | 2,824 |
| 90 | 667 | 333 | 500 | 222 | 167 | 2,667 |
| 95 | 632 | 316 | 474 | 211 | 158 | 2,526 |
| 100 | 600 | 300 | 450 | 200 | 150 | 2,400 |
| 105 | 571 | 286 | 429 | 190 | 143 | 2,286 |
| 110 | 545 | 273 | 409 | 182 | 136 | 2,182 |
| 115 | 522 | 261 | 391 | 174 | 130 | 2,087 |
| 120 | 500 | 250 | 375 | 167 | 125 | 2,000 |
| 125 | 480 | 240 | 360 | 160 | 120 | 1,920 |
| 130 | 462 | 231 | 346 | 154 | 115 | 1,846 |
| 135 | 444 | 222 | 333 | 148 | 111 | 1,778 |
| 140 | 429 | 214 | 321 | 143 | 107 | 1,714 |
| 145 | 414 | 207 | 310 | 138 | 103 | 1,655 |
| 150 | 400 | 200 | 300 | 133 | 100 | 1,600 |
| 155 | 387 | 194 | 290 | 129 | 97 | 1,548 |
| 160 | 375 | 188 | 281 | 125 | 94 | 1,500 |
| 165 | 364 | 182 | 273 | 121 | 91 | 1,455 |
| 170 | 353 | 176 | 265 | 118 | 88 | 1,412 |
| 175 | 343 | 171 | 257 | 114 | 86 | 1,371 |
| 180 | 333 | 167 | 250 | 111 | 83 | 1,333 |
Where these numbers get used
Delay and echo. A delay synced to the song is set in milliseconds: quarter note for a spacious echo, dotted eighth for the bouncing rhythm heard on countless guitar records, triplet when the song swings. Look up your tempo, set the pedal or plug-in, done.
LFO and modulation. A tremolo or filter LFO synced to one cycle per beat runs at BPM ÷ 60 hertz — 2 Hz at 120 BPM. One cycle per bar is a quarter of that.
Video and animation. Cutting on the beat means one cut every beat-length: 500 ms at 120 BPM, 428 ms at 140. Editors of music videos and lyric videos do this arithmetic constantly.
Finding a tempo from a loop. If a loop is exactly 2,000 ms for one bar of 4/4, each beat is 500 ms and the tempo is 120 BPM — the converter above runs in that direction too. And if you do not know the beat length at all, tap it out and come back with the BPM.
The formulas
Milliseconds per beat = 60,000 ÷ BPM. BPM = 60,000 ÷ milliseconds per beat. Note values scale from the quarter note: an eighth is half, a sixteenth a quarter, a dotted note is its plain value × 1.5, and a triplet note is its plain value × ⅔ (three in the time of two). Those are the only rules behind every number on this page — and behind the metronome itself, which adds one beat length to the audio clock for every click it schedules.