BPM to Delay (ms)

You dialed in a delay on the guitar by ear and the repeats still land slightly off the beat. Either the plugin has no host sync, or it does and you want to sanity-check the number it picked. Since the tempo fixes how long one beat lasts, the millisecond value of each note division is plain arithmetic. Enter the tempo and the three common values appear below.

Everything comes from 60000 divided by BPM, which is the quarter note in milliseconds: 500 ms at 120 BPM. Halve it for the eighth, 250 ms, and halve again for the sixteenth, 125 ms. Those three are what the display gives you, rounded to one decimal. Dotted and triplet values are not listed, but they come off the same figure: multiply by 1.5 for dotted, by 2/3 for triplets.

The same numbers work for reverb pre-delay, tremolo rate and compressor release. What it will not do: detect the tempo of an audio file, or handle tempo changes inside a song, where each section needs its own value. Enter a tempo of zero and the result reads Infinity, which is mathematically correct and not much use. The math runs in your browser.