Online metronome · Free · No sign-up
Unhurried without dragging. 70 BPM is roughly a resting heart rate, which is why it feels natural to sit inside, and it is the half-time pulse underneath a great deal of modern trap and dubstep.
Beats per minute
70
Press Space to start and stop · ↑ ↓ to nudge off 70 · or
The tempo
A beat every 0.86 seconds gives a slow ballad room to breathe while still carrying forward. It is also the tempo a lot of producers think they are working at when the session is really running at 140: the kick and snare fall on a 70 BPM grid even though the hi-hats are counting twice as fast.
Where you hear it
Double it and you land on 140 BPM, which is how a lot of this material is actually written. Same pulse, twice the counting.
Wondering whether a particular track is 70 BPM? Tap along with it and compare, or let the MagicBPM app listen and tell you.
Practice note: If a track feels like it is at 70 but the hi-hats are busy, count the kick and snare only. Half-time writing at 140 is the single most common reason two people disagree about a tempo.
Presets
Every one opens the metronome already running at that BPM.
Need something in between? The full metronome covers 40 to 220 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
About the pace of a resting heartbeat: unhurried, but clearly moving. A beat lands every 0.857 seconds, so one bar of 4/4 lasts 3.429 seconds and a three-minute song runs to about 52 bars. Press Play above to hear it.
70 BPM is slow. It falls in Adagio, between Largo and the walking pace of Andante, and it is exactly half of 140 BPM.
Soul and R&B ballads, and slow gospel; The half-time feel under 140 BPM trap and dubstep; Slow reggae and roots, where the one-drop sits around 70 to 90. The list is a guide rather than a rule: tempo varies within every genre.
Counted at double speed, 70 BPM is 140 BPM, which is how the same pulse is often written. Both readings describe the same music, which is why two people, or two apps, can give different answers for one song and both be right.
This page opens already set to 70 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.
