How to Count the Beats Per Minute: Hip Hop DJ

Video Transcript

"What's up everyone, I'm DJ PieceMeal and you're watching Expert Village. The first and most important thing you need to know about picking the right beat for beat matching or mixing is BPMs. What that stands for is beats per minute. I'm going to take a little second here to show you what it means and how to count it out. So essentially, BPMs are the rate or the speed at which the record revolves. There's a lot of different ways, many DJs will just feel it out, so if we play this beat right here. You'll see a lot of DJs tapping. Essentially this is the natural movement of the record and the tap is matching the beat. So what you want to keep in mind is when you have record on the other side of the platter it needs to essentially match the finger tapping that I'm doing right now. That's a real general way of doing it. Other DJs will actually come out and map the BPMs. A good way of doing that is to get a stopwatch and if need be a calculator and essentially count out the beats. So as you know, BPMs what I said earlier are beats per minute, so a good way to map it is to play your record, get that natural tapping down, start your stop watch for six seconds and then stop it. Then count how many taps you do and times it by ten that will say how many beats per minute the record is. A lot of DJs what they will do is get a piece of masking tape and put it on the record sleeve and say whatever song this is: ninety-five beats per minute. That way when your digging through your crates you will have a great idea what will mix well with that, without having to search and tap and adjust the pitch control that we talked about earlier. So let's first talk about how you count each beat. So we are going to start the record here. So like I said earlier it's really important to watch the tapping. So let's take it here's: one, two, three, four, two, two, three, four, three, two, three, four, four, two, three, four and that right there is how to count and that's basically one measure."