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. A missed or doubled tap is corrected rather than averaged in, and a pause of a few beats starts a fresh count. Stop tapping and the reading stays on screen, dimmed, until you tap again.
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. Read Delay times right under the BPM field — straight, dotted and triplet for every note value; tap one to copy it.

Reset clears the taps and the held reading. A new round of taps also replaces a tempo you typed or loaded from the setlist.

Setting the tempo by hand

Type a number into the BPM field (10–400) 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.

Clicks, accents and volume

• Click sets the clicks per beat: ♩ one, ♪♪ eighths, 3 triplets, ♬ sixteenths. The in-between clicks are short and quiet, so the beat stays clear.
• Tap a beat dot to change that beat: accented → normal → soft → silent → accented. Beat 1 is accented by default. Each time signature remembers its own pattern — accent 1, 4 and 6 in 7/8 once and it stays.
• Vol sets the click level.

Practice

Under ⚙ Settings (top right) → Practice:

• Speed trainer — raises (or lowers) the tempo by a step every few bars until it reaches the target, then holds: "+5 BPM every 4 bars to 160". The BPM field shows the tempo as it climbs.
• Gap click — plays some bars and leaves others silent ("play 3 bars, mute 1"), so you find out whether you hold the time on your own. The beat dots keep moving through the silent bars.

Count-in

Under the setlist, Count-in sets Off, 1, 2 or 4 bars. A song loaded from the setlist is counted in for that many bars when you press ▶ Count in — see Keep a setlist of tempos.

Settings

The ⚙ at the top right opens Settings:

• 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 (WAV or MP3). Your sounds are kept in this browser on this device — they are not uploaded or synced to your account, so pick them again on another device.
• 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 and a tapped tempo outside them is halved or doubled into the range (tap 250 with 60–200 and it reads 125). A tempo you type, or ½× / 2×, is left as you set it.
• Haptic feedback (mobile) — a small vibration on each beat on phones that support it.

Good to know

• A reload brings back the typed BPM, the time signature and the Previous BPMs on this device.

• Space taps unless a text field or a control you reached with the keyboard has focus. Holding it down counts as one tap.

• 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 — the delay grid, ms or Hz, copying a value.
• Tune an instrument — instrument presets, custom tunings, strobe view.