120 BPM Metronome

One hundred and twenty beats per minute is the closest thing music has to a standard tempo. It is the default in Ableton, Logic, FL Studio and Pro Tools; it is the marching tempo of most military quick marches; and when researchers ask people to tap a beat with no reference, the average lands remarkably close to 120. It is fast enough to feel active and slow enough to be comfortable, which is why so much pop, rock and house sits within a few BPM of it.

The arithmetic is as friendly as the feel. A beat is exactly 500 milliseconds, a bar of 4/4 is two seconds, an eighth note is 250 ms and a sixteenth is 125 ms. Eight bars is sixteen seconds and a 32-bar section is a minute and four seconds. Those clean numbers are one reason producers default here even when the finished track ends up elsewhere — the mental maths never gets in the way.

For practice it is a double-edged tempo. Because it is so comfortable, almost everyone can play at 120 BPM, which means playing well at 120 proves less than it feels like it does. Use it as a base rather than a destination: set the speed trainer to add two BPM every couple of bars and find the tempo where your technique actually breaks down. That number, not 120, is the one worth working on. The 120 BPM loop library is a useful play-along reference.