Getting started

BPM Forge has two tabs: Tapper (tap tempo, metronome, setlist and delay calculator) and Tuner. This page covers the Tapper; the tuner has its own page.

Quick start

1. Open BPM Forge from the dashboard. You land on the Tapper tab.
2. Tap the big TAP button in time with the music, or press Space. The BPM appears after a few taps and the label under it reads Steady, OK or Unsteady depending on how even your taps were.
3. Pick the Time signature — 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 6/8 or 7/8 — or type your own beats and note value in the two small fields.
4. Press ▶ Metronome. It clicks at the tapped tempo with beat 1 accented; the dots under the button light up on each beat.
5. Open Delay Calculator at the bottom to read delay times in milliseconds for that tempo.

Reset clears the taps and starts again.

Setting the tempo by hand

Type a number into the BPM field (20–300) instead of tapping. Next to it, ½× and 2× halve or double the current tempo and Copy puts the value on the clipboard. Previous BPMs lists your recent tempos; tap one to recall it.

Opening /app/bpm-forge?bpm=124 fills the BPM field on load — that is what TempoSense's Send to BPM Forge uses.

Time signature

The top number sets beats per bar and which beat is accented; the bottom number sets the note value that drives the click — a /8 signature clicks twice as fast as /4. The custom fields accept 1–32 for both and deselect the preset pills unless the values match one.

Count-in

Under the setlist, Count-in sets Off, 1, 2 or 4 bars. Starting a song from the setlist counts you in for that many bars before the metronome runs — see Keep a setlist of tempos.

Settings

The Settings panel folds out below the setlist:

• Click sound — Beep, Woodblock, Rim, Cowbell, Tick or Custom. For Custom, upload a sound for All beats and optionally a separate one for Beat 1; without it beat 1 uses the All-beats sound, louder. Each file is at most 3 seconds.
• Tap smoothing — Instant follows your last taps, Average and Weighted smooth them.
• Round BPM to integer — no decimals.
• BPM range lock — set Min and Max so an off-tap cannot throw the reading out of range.
• Haptic feedback (mobile) — a small vibration on each beat on phones that support it.

Good to know

• Pressing Space inside a text field types a space; it only taps when nothing is focused.
• Switching to the Tuner tab stops the metronome so its clicks do not leak into the microphone.
• ← / → move between the tabs when the tab bar has focus.
• When you are signed in, your setlists, settings and tuner preferences follow your account to your other devices — see Account sync.

Next

• Keep a setlist of tempos — the band's tempos, locked for the show.
• Read delay times for a tempo — what the Base, ÷ 4 and ÷ 8 columns mean.
• Tune an instrument — instrument presets, custom tunings, strobe view.