Brizm
How to convert BPM to milliseconds
A minute has 60,000 milliseconds, so one beat lasts 60,000 ÷ BPM. At 120 BPM a quarter note is 500 ms. Every other note value is a multiple of that quarter note: an eighth is half of it, a sixteenth a quarter of it, a whole note four times it.
60,000 ÷ 120 = 500 ms500 ÷ 2 = 250 ms500 × 4 = 2000 ms
Not sure of the tempo? Tap it on the red pad, or measure it first with Tap BPM and its stability readout. To hear a tempo before you use it, open the Metronome.
Dotted and triplet delays
A dot adds half the note again, so a dotted value is 1.5 times the straight one. A triplet squeezes three notes into the space of two, so it is 2/3 of the straight value. At 120 BPM an eighth note is 250 ms, a dotted eighth 375 ms and an eighth-note triplet 166.67 ms.
Straight delays sit on the grid and thicken a part. Dotted delays land between the beats and answer it. Triplet delays roll against a straight beat, the way a shuffle does. Program the same patterns in the Drum Machine to hear the difference against a beat.
Milliseconds to Hz for LFO and tremolo rates
A rate in Hz is how many cycles fit in one second: 1000 ÷ ms. A quarter note at 120 BPM is 500 ms, so an LFO at 2 Hz completes one cycle per beat. The table shows the Hz beside every value: set a tremolo, an auto-pan or a filter LFO to it when the effect has no tempo sync.
Reverb pre-delay and decay to tempo
Start from one bar of 4/4: 240,000 ÷ BPM milliseconds. A hall gets two bars of total length and a pre-delay of 1/64 of a bar. A large room gets one bar and 1/128, a small room half a bar and 1/256, a tight space one beat and 1/512. The decay is the length minus the pre-delay, so the tail ends on the grid and does not smear the next downbeat.
240,000 ÷ 120 = 2000 msHall: pre-delay 31.25 ms, decay 3968.75 ms
This is a convention, not physics: a starting point that keeps a reverb in time. Shorten the decay for a busier mix; lengthen the pre-delay to keep a vocal in front of its reverb.
The dub delay: dotted eighth
The dotted eighth is three sixteenths long, so a chord on the beat comes back on the "a" of the beat, then on the "and" of the next one. Dub engineers rode tape echoes at settings like this with high feedback; tape loses treble on every pass, so each repeat came back darker than the last.
Hear it does the same: a minor seventh chord stab once a bar into a delay with low-pass and high-pass filters and soft saturation inside the feedback loop. Push the feedback toward 85 % to hear the repeats pile up, or pick another value in the table to compare.
