Beginner DJ Advise on BPM, Beats per Minute, What's It for, How Do You Work It Out?

0:00 It actually means beats per minute

All right guys, what is BPM? What does it mean? Hmm. BPM. Best Pay Mum. Buy Paper Monday. Bring Proposed Manuscript. It actually means beats per minute. So, BPM pretty much is this. For every single minute you need to count how many beats there are in that minute. But is it easy to count BPM? How do you do it? What are you supposed to do? What do you need? Let me show you. All right, I've got two pieces of paper here. Now they're A4 and the paper of course is exactly the same size from left to right. Now, let's just imagine that these two pieces of paper from left to right no longer size. It's now time from left all the way to right is one minute. So now that is one minute in time. So too is this one here. Now you'll notice on this top piece of paper we have some lines.

There's a thin line which is the beginning of the piece of paper. One, two, three, four and five. One at the end. So one either side, three in the middle. It's five. Now let's just imagine that those are kicks in a track playing. One, two, three, four, five. Five kicks in one minute. Five beats in one minute. Now that is a very, very slow track but there are still beats in that minute. Beats per minute. Let's have a look at this one here. Slightly more. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine beats in the same amount of time one minute. Nine BPM. Nine beats per minute. Let's go in that mad room over there and have a listen to a track from Karmic Power Records and let's see how many beats we've got in Do You Remember?

2:31 How do we work out the BPM?

This track is at one, two, five BPM. In other words, every single minute of this track playing you will hear one hundred and twenty-five beats. Now it does fluctuate from one, two, five to one, two, five point three but that's very possibly because it's just not through the Rekordbox software but I am pretty sure it's one, two, five BPM. So how do we work out the BPM? What are we listening for? What do we need to listen to to find out what the BPM is? What is BPM? I mean, what are we listening for? Crying Out Quiet. Let's have a listen to the track again. Oh, let's shake the camera as much as we can! Right, okay so... Sometimes for the new DJ it's a great way or a great way of working out the BPM and listening for the BPM is to listen for the kick.

Listen. That sound that is playing at the same time as me clicking my fingers. Bam, bam, bam. That is the kick. That is what we are listening for. That is the sound that will determine not only for us but for the software what the BPM is. Now bearing in mind time never changes. Time will always be a minute. Remember our piece of paper? Here we go, here's our minute. Now then check this out. This is quite cool. What I'm going to do now, I'm now going to reduce the BPM the speed of the track and I can do that by moving the pitch away from me to the minus position. Now what's happened is... Let's imagine that this piece of paper here had a hundred and twenty-five lines on it. Now what we've done is we've kept our time one minute.

4:57 Here one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine

We've kept the size, the size isn't going anywhere because that's time. What we've done though is now we've widened the gaps in between each kick. So let's have a listen. We're now down to a hundred and twenty BPM. That's a hundred beats per minute. But check this out. Here one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Can we get this track to do nine BPM? Yes we can. We're going to go to wide. The wide feature will not only reduce the BPM but it will reduce the BPM to such an extent that we can stop the track completely. So at the moment, even where the pitch is there and the wide feature it's at 42.5 BPM. Let's get this sucker all the way down to nine BPM. So it's just about there-ish but it's very difficult to get it perfect

Because this sensitivity on the pitch has completely gone out of the window. Nine point four. Have a listen. We haven't even got a beat yet. This is slow. This is slow. This is really slow. This is too slow. I need a pen. Don't go anywhere. Oi, Jonathan! Have you got a pen up there I could use please mate? Yeah. Got one here for ya. That was just too slow. That was too slow. Nine BPM. Too slow. Okay. What we're going to do. We're going to put two there. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Now let's have a look and see how many lines we've got. Go over there pen. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen,

7:22 One, two, three, four

Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. Twenty-five BPM. Let's put this sucker up to twenty-five BPM. Okay. Thirty-three. Too fast. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six. Can we get to twenty-five? Can we get... Yes! Twenty-five. Let's have a listen and see what it sounds like at twenty-five BPM. One, two, three, four. I'm going to speed it up. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and so on. So this is BPM. This is what we're looking at. Beats per minute. Okay. We've gone slow. Why don't we try fast? Now, with a lot of controllers like these, in fact most players for DJs, we can increase, decrease by six percent, ten percent, sixteen, sometimes thirty-two, sometimes fifty, even

A hundred. There's no point going to two hundred percent. You know why? Because once you reduce the track by a hundred percent it stopped. That's it. It don't go any slower. Let me show you. Oh, that's a one hundred percent. So all that's happened is the beats there have gone to absolutely nothing. There are no beats. We have just pressed stop. But very simple question. Let's imagine we increase it by a hundred percent. We're now at one twenty-five. Guess what? We can get this track up to two hundred and fifty BPM. Yes, guys and girls. Two hundred and fifty BPM which is pretty fast. Okay. Let's have a listen. Oh my goodness. Okay. That is BPM. Beats per minute. Every time you hear that kick count it because that's going to be one kick in your minute.

Big shout out to Karmic Power Records. And I will finish off by saying practice your BPM and enjoy. Thank you very much.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.