How to Calculate Delay Time to Tempo Beat

Here’s how to calculate millisecond delay time to your tempo so you can make adjustments on the fly (or just set it correctly for a hardline beat delineation.) Needless to say, if you’re not going for strict tempo beat pulses then you can skip equations and do this “by feel”.It’s very simple if you remember this equation:

* Delay time in ms (Milli-seconds) = 60000/BPM (Beat Per Minute)

Will give you a quarter note delay time.

OR

* Crotchet (Quarter note) timing in ms (Milli-seconds) = 60000/120 (BPM) = 500 ms

A millisecond is 1/1000th of a second, and tempo beats per minute (BPM) gives you an exact beat count per minute. (120BPM is 120 beats per minute.)

The above equation gives you the timing for every beat (i.e. the delay repeats will be synchronized with your beats).

The same thing in a musicians term will be as under :

* Delay time for crotchet in ms = 60000/BPM (Beat Per Minute)
* Delay time for Quaver in ms = 60000/BPM/2 (Beat Per Minute)
* Delay time for Semi-Quaver in ms = 60000/BPM/4 (Beat Per Minute)

Example :

Suppose your song tempo is 120 BPM, then the delay calculation is as follows:

* Crotchet (Quarter note) timing in ms (Milli-seconds) = 60000/120 (BPM) = 500 ms
* Quaver (Eighth note) timing is = 500 ms / 2 = 250 ms
* Semi-Quaver (Sixteenth note) timing is = 500 ms / 4 = 125 ms

Explanation :

BPM means beats per minute. So a tempo of 120 BPM means that the song is playing 120 beats per minute. Therefore 120 beats / 60 seconds = 2 beats per second. Since 1 second = 1000 Milli-seconds, hence if we divide 1 second (1000 Milli-seconds) by 2 Beats, we get 1/2 seconds ( 500 Milli-seconds) for every beat.

5 thoughts on “How to Calculate Delay Time to Tempo Beat

  1. This is what i was looking for!!
    thanks for the great explanation on how to convert BPM to mS hopefully i can now create my code for my project

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