so, i decided to write a short tutorial for my fellow future producers..

this time i want to answer the ever so often asked question "how do i find the bpm's of a sample and then adjust it?"


ok, first of all (thanks to Bruce Leroy for pointing to this link in a different thread) you should download this tool for finding the correct bpm of a song/sample

http://www.analogx.com/contents/down...o/taptempo.htm

(sorry, this software is for windows user only)

for getting the correct setting you simply start the program, play the desired song and press the spacebar on every beat and after a few seconds you will see the tempo in the display

when doing this you have to be careful that you really hit the spacebar correctly in sync with the beat, otherwise you will get wrong results..


next, if you haven't done this already, you can use your favorite audio editing tool to do whatever you want to do with this sample i.e. loop it, add effects or change the pitch.. (in my case adobe audition)


ok, so far so good, but what if you have two samples, but they play at different bpm's and you want to match them?
or what if you want to change the tempo of one sample to a certain desired tempo?


some audio editing tools, so i have read, allow you to enter the current bpm and change tempo
to a special bpm-setting, but those, to be honest, i have never worked with, so i tell you "my way"

i have worked with adobe audition where you can only change tempo to a certain ratio and here a simple calculation helps out:



*going back to maths class*

• we have the tempo "t"
  
• we have a desired tempo "dt"
  
• and we have the needed calculation factor "f"

the general equation looks like this:

t * f = td so f = td/t

let's imagine we have a sample playing at 64 bpm but we want it to play at 96 bpm, then our equation would be:

64 * f = 96

to get "f" we simly divide "dt" by "t", in our case 96 divided by 64..

the result in our case is 1,5.. i chose these bpms on purpose so we receive an easy factor to calculate with. this will not always be the case, but don't be intimidated if you get a result like "1,340503024304923", you can just round the result to approx. 5 digits and should be close enough

by the way, you will always receive a number higher than 1 if you want to make your bpms faster, and you will always receive a number lower than 1 when making the samples tempo slower


within adobe audition/cool edit pro you have to enter a certain ratio for changing tempo. this ratio is compared to "100 f" whereas the result of our calculation is only "1 f". so we simly multiply our result by 100, in our case 1,5 * 100 making the proper number to put into the ratio field "150"

if your "f" turns out to be "1,340503024304923", then "134,050" should be close enough


now you have your sample playing at the desired tempo and you can fully integrate it in your track

happy producing