BPM by Genre: Tempo Chart for Trap, Drill, House, Lo-Fi

Every genre has a home tempo, but the number alone does not tell you how a beat feels. Trap and drill both sit around 140 BPM and groove like 70, while house and techno share the high 120s and sound nothing alike. Here is the chart, then what to do with it in a session.

Genre	Typical BPM	Feel / notes
Lo-fi hip-hop	60-90	Most beats sit at 70 to 90. Swung, off-grid drums and jazz chords
R&B	60-90	Slow jams at the bottom. Trap-leaning R&B is written at 130 to 150 in half-time
Boom bap	85-95	Snare on two and four, sampled loops, heavy swing
Reggaeton and Latin	85-100	Dembow kick and snare pattern, 90 is a common start
Afrobeats	100-115	Syncopated, laid-back percussion that sits off the grid
House	120-130	Four-on-the-floor kick, offbeat open hat. Deep house sits at the slow end
Tech house	122-128	Most club tracks land at 125 to 128, rolling basslines
Techno	125-140	Darker and more driving. Hard techno runs 140 to 160
EDM and big room	126-132	128 is the default. Long builds, sparse drops
Trap	130-150	Half-time, feels like 65 to 75. Hats run at full speed
Phonk	130-150	Cowbell and distorted 808. Drift phonk pushes the top end
Dubstep	138-142	Almost always 140, felt in half-time at 70
UK drill	140-145	Half-time, snare on beat three, sliding 808s
US drill (New York)	140-150	UK-style drums, harder 808s, New York delivery
Drum and bass	160-180	Modern tracks sit at 170 to 175

Half-Time and Double-Time: Why 140 Can Feel Like 70

The number in your DAW is the grid, not the groove. Trap at 140 puts the main snare on beat three instead of two and four, so the beat breathes like a 70 BPM record while the hats run at full speed. Drill and dubstep work the same way.

That is why published charts disagree. Native Instruments puts trap at 130 to 150 BPM while Splice files it under 70 to 80, and both describe the same beats counted two ways. Double-time works in reverse, so 174 BPM drum and bass lines up with an 87 BPM hip-hop beat, two bars against one.

The friction is that a loop labelled 70 plays at double speed in a 140 project if the DAW takes the label literally. In Ableton, hit the ×2 button in the clip's warp controls, or tell any other DAW the loop is 140. The trap guide covers writing hats in that half-time pocket.

Set the Project Tempo Before You Record Anything

Set the tempo first, because everything after it is built on that grid. Type it into the tempo field, or match a reference by ear with Ableton's Tap button or the tempo tapper in FL Studio's Tools menu.

MIDI follows any tempo change for free. Audio does not, because a warped clip gets stretched and an unwarped one drifts out of sync, and a stretched vocal can sound processed after only a few BPM.

The friction is that a late tempo change costs you twice. Your audio stretches, and anything set in milliseconds rather than note values, like a sidechain release or a gate, is still tuned for the old tempo.

Fitting a Loop Recorded at Another BPM

Time-stretching, called warping in Ableton and Flex Time in Logic, changes a loop's speed without changing its pitch. Pulling a 92 BPM loop down to 90 is rarely audible, but dragging a 90 BPM loop up to 140 smears the transients and leaves the hats flammy.

Drums want a transient-based stretch mode and full mixes want a polyphonic one. Slowing a loop down is usually harsher than speeding it up, because the algorithm has to fill the gaps between hits, which shows up as a grainy, ghosted tail.

The older alternative is repitching, where speed and pitch move together like a sped-up record, and the transients stay intact because nothing gets chopped. Moving a loop from 90 to 95 BPM raises it by close to a semitone, so check that the key still fits your 808.

The friction is that the best fix is often not stretching at all. If a loop sits 50 BPM away from your project, find one at your tempo, or at exactly half or double it, before you reach for a warp mode.

Same Tempo, Different Genre

Tempo picks the lane, but the drums decide the genre. Drill and trap both live around 140 in half-time, and what separates them is the drill snare that often moves to beat four in the second bar, the skipping hats and the gliding 808. Program drill with trap's straight hats and you get trap with a darker melody, which is why the drill guide starts with the drums.

House and techno meet in the high 120s, so a 128 BPM track reads as techno when the palette goes dark and hypnotic, and as house when the chords and swing come back. Lo-fi house borrows lo-fi's dusty texture but keeps house tempo, usually near 120.

The friction is that copying a reference tempo does not copy the genre. Matching the BPM gets you the grid, but the groove comes from where the hits land, which the house and lo-fi guides cover in detail.

Finding the BPM of an Unlabeled Sample

Start with the filename, because most packs print tempo and key there. If it is missing, let Ableton's warp engine or Logic's Smart Tempo estimate it, then confirm by ear against the metronome.

For a clean loop, do the math. Trim it to start on the first kick and end right before it repeats, then divide beats × 60 by the length in seconds, so one bar of 4/4 lasting 2 seconds is 120 BPM.

The friction is that detectors love to guess half or double. A 140 drill loop often comes back as 70, and heavy swing or a loop that starts off the downbeat can throw the guess off completely. Try the half and double of any number you get, and keep the one where the snare lands where the genre expects it.

A beat at the right tempo with the wrong drums is still the wrong genre, so treat the chart as your starting grid, not the finish line.