- BPM and Genres: From Hip Hop to Break-Beat, Techno to Trip Hop.
- Thursday, September 04, 2008
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In this second segment of our educational weblog, we are going to look at the importance of BPM.
BPM stands for beats per minute and refers to the number of beats that occur in a minute of time for a given piece of music. BPM is a measurement of tempo.
The importance of BPMs is demonstrated when beat matching, which is a style of mixing. This style is based on the concept of having 2 different songs with two different BPMs that are not perfectly matched with one another. The goal is to get the two songs to match by either increasing or decreasing the speed of one or both songs, until their BPMs level out and match one another.
In his article, BPM and Genres: From Hip Hop to Break-Beat, Techno to Trip Hop, Rob Wegner explains the significance of BPM’s to beat mixing and how it is actually related to the music genre.
He also shows how music genres like Hip Hop, Trip Hop, Jazz, Drum-n-Bass, etc, are generally confined to a specific BPM range.
The BPM of a song is not only relevant to beat mixing; it’s also strongly related to music genre. For example, if a DJ raises the beats per minute or BPM (i.e., the drum beats) of a hip hop song to approximately 135 BPM, the song’s beats become “break-beat.”
Alternatively, if a DJ lowers the BPM of a techno or hard house track to 90 BPM, the song becomes “trip hop.”
“Trip hop,” for example, is characterized as being downtempo jazz, funk, and soul-inflected break-beats that includes experimental psychotropic atmospherics (i.e, the “trip” part). Even though trip hop is not downtempo “techno” and “hard house” tracks per se, a DJ is able to create—in a live performance setting—a trip hop-like track by simply slowing down the BPM.
A rough guide showing the relationship between BPM and genre is provided below:
As the chart above shows, music genres are generally confined to a specific BPM range. For example, a house track would not be considered “house” (in the traditional sense) if it had a tempo of 70 BPM. Likewise, a hip hop track would not be considered “hip hop” (again, in the traditional sense) if its BPM was pitched up to 140 BPM.
If you’re a DJ that is specialized in a specific genre such as “only tribal house,” it’s very unlikely that you’ll have to spend time determining and labeling BPM for the tracks in your music library. This is because these tracks are already near each other in terms of BPM range. On the other hand, some genres—such as hip hop—have a wider BPM range and may require a little time calculating and sorting songs by BPM.BPM and Genres: From Hip Hop to Break-Beat, Techno to Trip Hop by Rob Wegner, October 2004, (http://www.discjockey101.com/oct2004.html)