Online metronome · Free · No sign-up
The floor of the drum & bass range and the ceiling of footwork. At 170 BPM the drums are moving three times a second while the bass and the melody sit at half that, which is what makes the tempo feel urgent rather than frantic.
Beats per minute
170
Press Space to start and stop · ↑ ↓ to nudge off 170 · or
The tempo
A beat every 0.353 seconds is faster than most people can tap accurately, so 170 is nearly always felt in half time, at 85. Jungle and liquid drum & bass tend to start here and run to about 176; footwork and juke come at it from the other side, built on 160 and pushed up. Tempo detectors report 85 for this music as often as they report 170, and neither answer is wrong.
Where you hear it
Wondering whether a particular track is 170 BPM? Tap along with it and compare, or let the MagicBPM app listen and tell you.
Practice note: Write the drums at 170 and the bass at 85. If a bassline sounds busy and cluttered, it is usually because it followed the drums instead of the half-time pulse.
Presets
Every one opens the metronome already running at that BPM.
Need something in between? The full metronome covers 40 to 300 BPM.
MagicBPM for iPhone and Android
The app pairs the same metronome with a real-time BPM detector that hears the music around you, so you can lift a tempo off a track and practice to it straight away.
Good to know
Very fast on the surface, with a relaxed 85 BPM pulse underneath. A beat lands every 0.353 seconds, so one bar of 4/4 lasts 1.412 seconds and a three-minute song runs to about 127 bars. Press Play above to hear it.
170 BPM is very fast, near the top of Vivace and just short of Presto. It is exactly double the 85 BPM pulse most listeners actually feel.
Jungle, liquid and drum & bass at the slower end of the range; Footwork and juke, which climb to 170 from 160; Bluegrass and old-time fiddle tunes taken at speed. The list is a guide rather than a rule: tempo varies within every genre.
This page opens already set to 170 BPM, so press Play or hit the spacebar. To move off it, drag the slider, type a number into the BPM box, or use the arrow keys to nudge a beat at a time.
Measuring instead of setting? Use the tap tempo tool to find a song’s BPM.
