BPM Relationships

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magnusmaximum714

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Hey guys,

I just wanted to know what the relationship was between the bpm of a drum pattern and the segment bpm that is given for a melody (doesn't necessarily have drums in it) on a DAW like ableton or fruity loops. The reason I ask this is because if I have a drum pattern set at 90bpm, if I try and bring the melody down or up to 90bpm to get everything in sync the 2 do might not match up at all. Any word on this would be welcome.

Thanks
 
Hi, I don't really understand your question. If you have the tracks in exact same tempo they are in the same tempo.

If they don't match up, maybe you have not quantized your drums and they are way off?
 
Thanks for the reply jyri I'll try to make it clearer

If I have a drum bpm of 90 and a melody bpm of 118 sometimes that melody at that tempo sounds fine over a 90 bpm track. But if I were to try and adjust the tempo of a melody at 118 that isn't congruent with 90 bpm drums and move the tempo down to 90 bpm it won't necessarily work. I'm just trying to see if there is some mathematical relationship between drum hits working with a particular melody so that I know how to adjust accordingly in the future.
 
Are they audio tracks or MIDI tracks? If the 118 is MIDI and the 90 is audio, then when you slow down the tempo to 90 then it should fit. If they're both MIDI and you slow down the tempo then your drums will also slow down. Just don't try to do that though, don't put different tracks at different tempos. You might have recorded the MIDI at 118 so it would fit the 90 but it doesn't. I don't know how to explain it, main point is, make all your tracks the same tempo.
 
magnusmaximum714 said:
I'm just trying to see if there is some mathematical relationship between drum hits working with a particular melody so that I know how to adjust accordingly in the future.
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The relationship is that the bpm has to match, if you are incorporating a sample to a drum loop or something. And the time signature has to be the same on both. After that, it's all about making good drum tracks that work well together with the melody.

How do you get the bpm for the sample (are you relying on some software)? I'd rely more on my ears than some software.

Maybe count the bars and check out the sample lenght and and calculate the bpm from there if you have to.
 
I think he means that if he has a sample and he lets ableton detect the tempo of it, sometimes it doesnt match with the drums he lays down on supposedly the same tempo. The answer to that is, if the sample has no drums it is very hard for the software to the determine the tempo, other things in the sample might throw the program off too. Its best to just use your ears.

In your example earlier you said you had 90 bpm drums fitting with a sample (these are audio samples right?)that the program was telling you was 118 bpm, That sounds like the software got the wrong bpm due to lacking drums etc. and the real bpm was 90.
 
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Have you changed the warp mode, checked your warp markers? It sounds like you're just pulling the sample tempo and Live's guessing it a bit wrong, so some manual labour is in order, rather than having to work out some equations regarding the "relationship".
 
exactly what I was doing. I somehow felt that the software was more adept at music than I was
 
Ableton is great for beat matching. Anybody remember having to beat match two samples using nothing but outboard gear?
 
Different tempos (and even different time signatures) can fit together for example if you have a 90 BPM vocal you can easily drop it onto a 180 BPM Drum and Bass track and it will work because it is exactly twice the BPM.

When I have to find the tempo of audio that lacks transients for beat detection software to detect, I use a stopwatch and a calculator 60/2.526=23.75x4=95 BPM (60 as in how many seconds in a minute, that's the M in BPM) 2.526 (that's the readout from the stopwatch after timing the length of one bar) when you divide 60 by 2.526 you get an answer of 23.75 that you then need to multiply by 4 because you timed one bar (that's the amount of beats in however many bars you timed, so if you timed 2 bars you would multiply by 8 and so on).

Provided the tempo is steady the more bars you can time the more accurate the tempo reading will be at the end because you shrink the amount of error, that's why tap tempo that works off each tap is not that accurate.
 
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