We’ve had a few requests for the musical formula to figure out delay times based on tempo (BPM – Beats Per Minute). Obviously Beats Per Minute tempo settings give you how many beats occur per minute, which give you a pretty good clue how many beats occur per second (just divide the BPM by 60 – 120 BPM / 60 = 2 beats Per Second), but how many milliseconds is that? 1000 milliseconds equals 1 second. So if you divide BPM by 60,000 (instead of 60) you will get the time in milliseconds (instead of seconds). Once you have that you can then easily divide that number by the appropriate note value to get the delay time to match. Here’s an example:

BPM = 120
60,000 / 120 = 500ms which usually means a 1/4 note = 500ms. Therefore an eighth note, which is half of a quarter note equals 250ms and a sixteenth note equals 125ms.

Another example:

BPM = 145
60,000 / 145 = 413.793
1/4 note = 413.793ms
1/8 note = 206.896ms
1/16 note = 103.448ms