We’ll hear about some of their general attitudes and techniques. Producers make tracks at a certain tempo to join a conversation with other tracks in his or her preferred genre.Īs you’ll see below, when DJs adopt an open mind towards tempo and genre, things quickly become very interesting.įor this feature, we’re focussing on eight experimenters who use tempo as a springboard for exploring different styles and creating divergent moods on a dance floor.

But tempo can be considered a rough guide to the terrain of dance music. A 4/4 track at 130 BPM? It might be techno. So how does genre factor into all of this? Well again, not to state the obvious but genre is, to a large extent, defined by tempo. With the advancements in DJ technology, which facilitate the wildest blends of sounds and tempos imaginable, this statement takes on extra resonance. Essentially, DJing can be described as selecting tracks from the entire history of recorded music and playing them in a desired sequence. A feature like Master Tempo means we can change the tempo of a song while keeping it in the same key. We can adjust a track’s tempo by as much as +/- 100%. Modern DJ gear tells us the exact BPM of the tracks we’re playing. These days, we’re almost completely in control. You could play a 45 RPM track at 33 RPM, or vice versa, but you might be doing something to the tune that sounded pretty wacky. Those records were limited by how much you could adjust a track’s original tempo: Technics turntables, for years the industry standard, allowed you to adjust the pitch (which does the same thing as tempo but also changes the key of a track) by only +/- 8%. Stop someone randomly in a rave and they might not be able to guess the BPM of the current track, but they’ll probably have preferences over tempo and expectations about how fast they’ll be moving their body that evening.Įven back in the day, when BPM information wasn’t embedded into DJ gear, a sense of tempo was a skill you’d acquire, building a picture of which records in your collection were in the same range. How fast or slow something is-thus determining its potential to be mixed-is a fundamental question, one that organises and influences the wider culture.

Not to state the blindingly obvious but, as DJs, if we want to mix tracks we need to match their BPM.

Why do we talk about BPM (beats per minute) in dance music so much? When you’re deep in this thing it can be easy to forget or overlook how fundamental tempo-and, by extension, genre-is to this scene. A few years ago, a fellow journalist, who wrote a column for a broad-ranging music magazine, told me about a chat he’d had with his editor, who’d asked something along the lines of, “Erm… why do you talk about BPM in dance music so much?”

New blue dj suite setup