Most common and average BPM: tempo data from 150 famous songs

Drummers ask about tempo for practical reasons: what speed to practise at, how fast "fast" really is, and which songs to try next. So we charted every song we have written a play-along groove for. Every number below is playable: press a button and the drum kit on this page loads that song at that tempo.

Loading the 3D drum kit…

▶Play Back in Black in the style of AC/DC ▾

− BPM +

Practice

The most common tempo range: 100–129 BPM

Three neighbouring buckets — 100–109, 110–119 and 120–129 BPM — hold 71 of 150 songs, almost half. Above 140 BPM the chart thins out, with a small second cluster at 170–179 BPM made of fast punk, drum & bass and swing.

The single most common tempo, 120 BPM, is two beats per second: a quarter note every 0.5 s and an 8th note every 0.25 s. Try it on the kit with the basic rock beat:

▶ Rock beat at 120 BPM

Tempo by genre

In this sample, reggae and hip-hop are the slowest genres and punk and swing jazz the fastest; electronic dance music sits in a narrow band around 120–130 BPM. Groups of four or five songs are indications, not rules.

The slowest and fastest songs

Slow is not the same as easy. At 60 BPM every beat lasts a full second, so any unevenness in your timing is easy to hear. Practise a slow groove with the click alone and you will notice it straight away:

▶ At Last at 60 BPM, your turn

Why BPM alone doesn't tell you how hard a beat is

Tempo counts beats, not notes. A rock beat with 8th notes on the hi-hat at 160 BPM and a funk beat with 16th notes at 80 BPM both ask your hand for about 320 hi-hat notes a minute. Play them back to back:

▶ 8th notes at 160 BPM ▶ 16th notes at 80 BPM

The funk groove is half the tempo but no easier for the hi-hat hand, and it adds kick notes between the beats. So when you choose your next song, look at the pattern on its page as well as the BPM: how many notes per bar, whether the kick plays off the beat, and whether there are ghost notes.

How to use tempo in practice

1. Learn new beats slowly. Starting well below the song tempo lets you play the pattern correctly before you play it fast.
2. Raise the tempo in small steps. On the kit, Practice → Speed up adds 2 BPM every four bars; in Your turn it only speeds up after bars you played in time.
3. Spend time in the 100–129 BPM range. Nearly half of our songs live there, so a groove that is solid at these tempos opens up a lot of the catalogue.
4. Practise slow tempos on purpose. Turn on Gaps and check whether you land back on beat one after the silent bars.

All 150 songs by BPM

Sorted from slowest to fastest. Each title opens the song page with the full pattern; ▶ loads the groove on the kit above.

How we counted

• The sample. These are the 150 songs in the Drums3D catalogue: songs people like to play on drums, across 14 genres and several languages, from the 1930s to today. A different set of songs would give different numbers.
• The tempos. Each song has one rounded tempo for its main groove, set to approximate the original recording. These are the tempos our practice grooves play at, not lab measurements: live drummers drift, and published tempo listings sometimes differ by a few BPM. If one looks wrong to you, tell us and we will fix it.
• What one beat is. In 4/4 one beat is a quarter note. In songs felt in 6/8 or 12/8 one beat is a dotted quarter (three triplet notes). Songs that feel half-time are counted at the slower, felt tempo.
• The grooves are simplified practice patterns in the style of each song, not transcriptions of the recordings.

Download the data

The full table — title, artist, genre, BPM, groove and link — is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a credit to Drums3D: song-tempos.csv.

Related: easy drum beats, step by step · all song beats.