Tap the button below in rhythm with a song or your own playing. After a few taps the average tempo in beats per minute appears, along with the matching classical tempo marking.

Tap at least 4 times for a stable reading. The tool averages your last 8 taps to smooth out small timing variations while still following changes in rhythm.

What this tool measures and how

Every time you click or tap the button, the tool records a precise timestamp using the browser's clock. From the second tap onward, it works out the time gap between consecutive taps and converts the most recent gaps into beats per minute. Rather than using every tap ever recorded, it keeps a rolling window of your last 8 intervals, so the reading tracks your current rhythm closely instead of slowly drifting toward an average of taps from a minute ago. The more consistently you tap, the tighter the BPM reading becomes.

Tempo markings reference: Largo to Presto

Marking	BPM range	Feel and examples
Largo	Below 60	Very slow and broad, close to the pace of a slow funeral march or a held orchestral chord.
Adagio	60 to 76	Slow and stately, typical of a power ballad or a slow movement in a piano sonata.
Andante	76 to 108	A relaxed walking pace, common in mid-tempo indie and folk songs.
Moderato	108 to 120	A comfortable, moderate pace found in a lot of mainstream pop and rock.
Allegro	120 to 168	Fast and lively, the range most UK garage, house and up-tempo pop tracks sit in, roughly 120 to 130 for house and around 130 to 140 for garage.
Presto	Above 168	Very fast, typical of drum and bass, which usually sits around 160 to 175, and the fastest classical scherzos.

Limits of a manual tap tempo tool

A tap tempo reading is only as steady as the person tapping it. Small variations in human reaction time, combined with the timing resolution of the browser and the device it runs on, mean the result is an estimate rather than a lab-grade measurement. Treat a reading within a couple of BPM of the true tempo as normal, and expect more spread if you tap on a touchscreen with your finger rather than click with a mouse. This tool is not a substitute for a hardware metronome or a professional tempo detection algorithm when exact timing matters, such as for click tracks in a recording session.

Practical uses

Tap along to a song playing on the radio or through headphones to find its BPM before matching your own playing or singing to it. DJs and anyone mixing tracks can use a quick tap to estimate the tempo of a record before beatmatching it against another. Producers working in a DAW can tap along to a reference track to set a rough starting tempo before fine-tuning it with the software's own detection tools.