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-- What BPM do you prefer for clubs, warehouses, or your house?
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What BPM do you prefer for clubs, warehouses, or your house?

generally I prefer 136-142 for clubs/raves/concerts

and for chilling at home or something that is not an epic event, I prefer playing songs at their default BPM.

whenever I compare the original with a video that was recorded live, the one recorded live always has a faster feel to it....

most songs are sped up at raves/concerts/clubs right?

120-128.

Exactly 117.54, if it's even a fraction of a beat off i start throwing things.

I don't have a watch, it's a BPM counter. If the musics amazing but .5 out, I leave.

i usually play the songs at the same bpm, if i am going to mix a 128 bpm tune with a 132 bpm tune then i'd leave it at 129 or so from the start and increase it smoothly. Excluding some tracks that really sound better played faster/slower you should leave it as it is, i see a lot of local djs who pitch all the tracks at +3% with master tempo, poor idiots, thats the reason they trainwreck so often, the whole dinamics of the kick are screwed due to the stretching

I like it between 60 and 180. True story.

!

I like it speedcore style with something hovering around 1000bpm.. POFF! in your FACE!

For clubs it depends of the atmosphere, i can accept pretty much everything from 126 to 140.

There are some areas in the clubs like a lounge that plays some Chill Out, is very cool.

But for raves, only 145

166,66. when u try it and find out why ull shit bricks.

1.21

quote:

Originally posted by Bierheld Exactly 117.54, if it's even a fraction of a beat off i start throwing things.

+1, i hate it when djs go nuts and play at 117.55 or more...

97 to 128

170 or higher. Not that I don't like slower stuff, but the fast stuff is just awesome to me.

140 and higher....anything under 130 puts me to sleep.

I took the bpm counter with me every time, but always was to drunk to remember the day after.... I smashed it when I found out the DJ used pitch....

Seriously I don't prefer one bpm. It depends on the club and even then I like some variation. Starting a bit slow 120-130, then up to 150-160 and end at 130-140. In between some ups and downs.

I'm obviously open to a wide range of tempos, depending on the genre and the party, although once you get past about 160 you're dancing in half time again. However, I tend to enjoy the 125-135 area the most. That range feels easiest to dance to, the music maintains a feeling of energy and you can dance to it for hours even without drugs and not get too tired. I don't mind the tempo going up past 140, but I'd rather the night builds up to that speed rather than starting off there and plateauing the whole time.

You know, there's is like an interesting discussion in here if you're just talking about general tempo progression in club nights.
I just think it's stupid to focus on BPM's because you (or I at least) can't accurately tell The BPM of the songs played just by listening to them. You can really only tell the difference in song tempo's relative to each other. I.O.W., It's either faster or slower then the last one. So claiming you want a range of 125-135 seems rather daft to me. The difference is barely noticable without context. It's also unnecessarily restrictive, you can't really boil live music down to technicalities like that, like someone mentioned in this very thread: If the DJ drops an awesome that's say 10 BPM out of your supposed "comfort range", you're not going to walk away are you?

325 bpm per second

quote:

Originally posted by geroin 325 bpm per second

+1 (326)

quote:

Originally posted by BECK +1 (326)

-2 (324)

-648

quote:

Originally posted by Bierheld You know, there's is like an interesting discussion in here if you're just talking about general tempo progression in club nights. I just think it's stupid to focus on BPM's because you (or I at least) can't accurately tell The BPM of the songs played just by listening to them. You can really only tell the difference in song tempo's relative to each other. I.O.W., It's either faster or slower then the last one. So claiming you want a range of 125-135 seems rather daft to me. The difference is barely noticable without context. It's also unnecessarily restrictive, you can't really boil live music down to technicalities like that, like someone mentioned in this very thread: If the DJ drops an awesome that's say 10 BPM out of your supposed "comfort range", you're not going to walk away are you?

partially true only. Sometimes you can at least feel that "this is not 140 bpm" and it is 138 bpm, or even more complicated, you know just by listening that it is 136 bpm. Most of the stuff my locals play is ~132bpm (128*3% pitch = 132 bpm) and i can feel this and is strange for me because i think "cheesy house at prog.trance speed... interesting"

I've realised that the bpms aren't that important, in my opinion they just classify the music you can make a house track at 145bpm but it's inappropiate, no dj's would play this tune and when listening at home it would feel unnatural.

To make things more complicated you've some beat signature variations like dubstep , when you listen to a dubstep track you instinctively think it is around 120bpm, feels slower than most house tunes at least, but probably it is 140 bpm, kinda strange...

Some tracks play with drive, i like to compare it to perspective in painting, the combination of kick + rolling bassline, syncopated bass and mostly different patterns of hi hats make the tune faster to our ears the same way perspective gives depth to a plain picture, but nothing is real indeed.

Finally there is only a fact, slower music has better dynamics, more opened and all the elements can breathe, 128 bpm seems to be the "perfect" bpm because each phrase is a minute but 125 bpm can be danced easily, most commercial tunes use slow bpms i don't know if it is just a coincidence or there is some science behind it.

On the other hand you've genres that need speed to become attractive, a full on trance track at 120bpm sounds stale, same as DnB, not to mention speedcore, at 1200bpm a kick does not sound like a kick anymore...

I don't know if the thread is a joke or not but there are some interesting things to discuss about bpms, the thing of my first post about pitching the tracks has always intrigued me

quote:

Originally posted by Bierheld You know, there's is like an interesting discussion in here if you're just talking about general tempo progression in club nights. I just think it's stupid to focus on BPM's because you (or I at least) can't accurately tell The BPM of the songs played just by listening to them. You can really only tell the difference in song tempo's relative to each other. I.O.W., It's either faster or slower then the last one. So claiming you want a range of 125-135 seems rather daft to me. The difference is barely noticable without context. It's also unnecessarily restrictive, you can't really boil live music down to technicalities like that, like someone mentioned in this very thread: If the DJ drops an awesome that's say 10 BPM out of your supposed "comfort range", you're not going to walk away are you?

I can roughly hear BPMs. If it's a 4/4 beat I can usually guess within a 5bpm range. I'm especially accurate between 120 and 145, perhaps because I mostly DJ in that tempo frame. Breaks throw me more, because they tend to sound slower than they really are, and anything below 100bpm just gets identified as "slow" by my ear.

But it's especially noticeable when you're dancing, because you're not just hearing a speed, you're moving in time with that speed. It affects what you do when you dance and how comfortable you are doing certain things. I have a totally different way of dancing to hip-hop than to, say psy-trance. If a DJ suddenly changes tempo by 10bpm and the track is awesome I'm not going to leave the floor, but I'll feel the difference and move in a different way. And again, I said 125-135bpm is my favourite range, not the only range I'll tolerate. I find it easiest to dance to, the most fun to dance to and the right energy level for extended periods of dancing.

You might find the following study interesting, which took the average tempo of thousands of dance records across a ten year period between 1998-2008 and analysed the results. I'll copy-paste the conclusion, which pretty much backs up what I'm saying, but adds a bit more science to it.

https://biblio.ugent.be/input/downl...9797&recordOId=

quote:

The long-term study and comparison to a diversity of data, obtained from different sources with a different stylistic background, allows us to distinguish between fixed factors and fluctuations related to the emergence of musical styles connected with specific body movements. The analysis of the �Scandinavian dance charts� over a period of 10 years shows that the main peak remains very consistently located at 128 bpm, this is supported by the data from other bpm-lists, which also illustrate a main peak at 128 bpm. The result of an analysis in which we simply retain the minimum value for each bpm over the 10 years studied is shown in figure 8. Again we see the range from 125 to 130 bpm stand out, with an extension towards 136 bpm. The slower tempi almost completely disappear from the raw data analysis, while some inconsistent noise remains apparent in the smoothed data analysis. This indicates that tempi across the peak range are not permanently played, but belong to certain trends that gain popularity over a limited time-span and are afterwards replaced by new hypes. Looking for variation in the data throughout time has allowed to identify the styles behind different tempo zones and to trace their evolution throughout time (e.g. the decline of 'trance' and fast techno 1998-2004 or the importance of R&B in the period 2002-2005). The constancy of the 125-130 bpm range suggests that this corresponds to a natural frequency that stimulates people to dance. This fundamental relation to movement and perception fixes the position of the main peak, while the secondary peaks that appear, depend more on trends and the popularity of certain substyles. Dance music not situated within the preferred range can be associated with different types of movement. And can be related to other resonance phenomena. Thus the slower tempi around 95 bpm can be related to more circular movements, such as hip swings, which are often associated with afro-american music and have some sexual connotations. In this case the typical up-and-down, locomotion related resonance is replaced by a fundamentally different type of behavior with a slower natural frequency. When dealing with higher frequencies, an opposite effect could be expected: people will probably make specific smaller movements. However, if we look at the music styles discussed here, notably trance, we might keep in mind the influence of drug-use, especially party-drugs like XTC or amphetamines. It is still possible to move freely to tempi around 140 bpm, but, according to the resonance model, it will take more energy to attain a similar level of movement. Thus the use of stimulating drugs, and behavior imitating this, will make it possible to deal with this higher frequency dancing. If we increase the tempo scale we see that the basic movements become smaller and are combined with larger movement coinciding with lower metric levels. This is the case both in boogie-woogie dancing, where small foot-steps at the fast speed are combined with large swinging movement, as well as in hardcore techno dancing where short kicks (�hakkuh�) are combined with slower arm movements. The natural tempo for dancing within a social context can be fixed around 128 bpm. This is only slightly above the assumed natural resonance at 2 Hz (120 bpm), associated with natural movement in music and repetitive movements like tapping, clapping and waving (Moelants, 2002). The same 2 Hz was found in the long-term energy spectrum of motor activity, measuring different people during their normal daily activities (MacDougall & Moore, 2005). Both the 120 bpm �spontaneous movement�-tempo and the 128 bpm �dance movement�-tempo both seem to be quite precisely located. This is shown in the above analysis for the dance tempo and by MacDougall & Moore (2005) for the normal human locomotion. They concluded that the location of the peaks is very fixed among different test subjects, regardless of the mechanical properties of their bodies. The 2 Hz phenomenon is also found in distributions of other samples of music (Van Noorden & Moelants, 1999; Moelants 2002 Interestingly the �pop�-cluster from our bpm analysis also has a peak closer to 120 bpm. Apparently, typical dance music occupies a special position if you compare it to a more general view on tempo distribution in music. So how can these two frequencies be related? When looking at the differences in speed when walking to music of different tempi, Styns, Van Noorden, Moelants and Leman (2007) found the highest averages in the area 126-138 bpm with a peak at 130 bpm, thus exactly coinciding with the data from the dance music analysis. Bertram (2005) found that at a constrained step frequency of 2.1 steps/s, subjects walked at a speed exceeding preferable walking speed and not chosing the most �economical� way of walking. He concluded that in this area, the �cost� of moving faster than the natural, most economical, speed, is so low that people easily tend to accelerate. We can conclude that tempi around 128 bpm are perfect for a somewhat �excited� movement and that music provides a good driving force to stimulate rhythmic behavior in this tempo zone. Thus we see a close relation between the characteristics of our body and the structural aspects of music that is designed to make the body move.

Whatever fits the mood of the environment.

quote:

Originally posted by Rodri Santos partially true only. Sometimes you can at least feel that "this is not 140 bpm" and it is 138 bpm, or even more complicated, you know just by listening that it is 136 bpm. Most of the stuff my locals play is ~132bpm (128*3% pitch = 132 bpm) and i can feel this and is strange for me because i think "cheesy house at prog.trance speed... interesting" I've realised that the bpms aren't that important, in my opinion they just classify the music you can make a house track at 145bpm but it's inappropiate, no dj's would play this tune and when listening at home it would feel unnatural. To make things more complicated you've some beat signature variations like dubstep , when you listen to a dubstep track you instinctively think it is around 120bpm, feels slower than most house tunes at least, but probably it is 140 bpm, kinda strange... Some tracks play with drive, i like to compare it to perspective in painting, the combination of kick + rolling bassline, syncopated bass and mostly different patterns of hi hats make the tune faster to our ears the same way perspective gives depth to a plain picture, but nothing is real indeed. Finally there is only a fact, slower music has better dynamics, more opened and all the elements can breathe, 128 bpm seems to be the "perfect" bpm because each phrase is a minute but 125 bpm can be danced easily, most commercial tunes use slow bpms i don't know if it is just a coincidence or there is some science behind it. On the other hand you've genres that need speed to become attractive, a full on trance track at 120bpm sounds stale, same as DnB, not to mention speedcore, at 1200bpm a kick does not sound like a kick anymore... I don't know if the thread is a joke or not but there are some interesting things to discuss about bpms, the thing of my first post about pitching the tracks has always intrigued me

Constant pitching is usually a lot more noticeable because it it tends to change the track's tone/feel significantly and often not in a good way, you can hear when it sounds distorted. The rest of the post i can agree with, as it indirectly complements my original point. I'll explain myself further:

Most tracks have a tempo consistent with the mood or tone of the track, usually depicted by the genre it's in. Different genres operate in different tempo ranges dependent on whatever suits what they're trying to achieve mood-wise. Makes sense, and explains why a house track at 140 BPM will sound stupid and trance at 120 sounds stale.

However, there is a twist. As you mentioned it has a lot to do with the type of beat itself. Assuming every track wants to operate at a natural sounding tempo, more abstract beat patterns may have deceptively high BPM's without really sounding speedy. From what i've noticed there's barely any 4/4 dance music in f.i. the 140-160 range of BPM's, Yet loads of other genre's operate there without sounding wildly fast, a lot of IDM related music even manages to sound relaxing while being in a BPM range that is considered frantic when talking about normal dance music. This is one reason i disagree with setting a small BPM range and making it sound absolute, as you disqualify the use/ ignore the presence of such music. Although granted it isn't commonly used in normal club sets. If you want a display of it, The mix in my signature has wildly varying BPM's, almost no 4/4 beats and for the most part isn't even beat-matched. A flow is achieved by working with the intensity of tracks rather then the tempo.

Now, both you and System J are vouching for there being a sort of consistently attractive BPM range for dance music based on what is comfortable to dance to. And yes, i will agree that 125-135 is a good tempo for house, techno and other dance music with consistent repetitive beat patterns. You can tell when it sort of feels 'right' and gives you a decent opportunity for movement without becoming too 'sway' if you will. You don't have to think about it as much. Although for me, contrary to what the article states, taking drugs doesn't influence that and doesn't necessarily make want to dance any faster. More like the opposite, i feel more content to keep dancing at that range whilst when i'm sober i fear stagnation a lot more and will want the music to go faster at some point to keep me entertained.
Which brings me to my next point: If every club set was in the 125-135 range (And unfortunately it seems most of them are) i'd be really bored of them by now. Some of the best sets in my opinion offer smooth variation with a couple of surprise tempo changes at the right moments. It may start at the 'comfy range' but take a deep break in slower tempo's whilst ending in tekno speeds and insanity. It may not be as easy to dance too but at least it'll be more memorable and not just because it's breaking status quo. I believe all seasonable tempo's have merit as long as the mood and time is right, and a good DJ will play with that fact. Unfortunately a lot of DJ's tend to stick with whatever's comfortable and known to work. Not so much a wrong thing at times though, I'm just glad we have the choice to mix things up a bit in current club land. As even despite the repetitive nature of dance music stagnation is still it's greatest enemy.

Also, on a different but related subject: To me a lot of club nights feel slow throughout and my friends seem to agree with that. DJ's tend to take the whole night into consideration and as such are uncomfortable with raising the set tempo too quickly fearing stagnation at the peak moments. I feel this is the reason why the dancefloor is always empty in the early hours. I've always wondered if there is a good way to fix this as a linear set flow feels so natural and important to club nights.

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