Know Your Tempos - Benjamin Waterson

Know Your Tempos: Steely Dan

February 10, 2025

Here’s another post about pulling a BPM seemingly out of thin air. It’s easier than you think — all you have to do is memorize the BPMs of some really famous songs, perhaps from a band like Steely Dan. Here’s my boilerplate explanation of a “Know Your Tempos” article, shamelessly stolen from Todd Bishop: If you ever see…
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Know Your Tempos: Rage Against the Machine

July 9, 2023

The Fourth of July holiday has come and gone with little fanfare on my website. Last week I was really motivated to rant about cut time, but since I’m such a patriotic person, let’s belatedly commemorate the holiday with some Rage Against the Machine. With only three albums out there, Rage Against the Machine is…
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Know Your Tempos: Pink Floyd

March 6, 2022

I’ve been perusing Pink Floyd’s discography as part of a more ambitious post for next week, when I realized that I could kill two birds with one stone and whip up a “Know Your Tempos” post to help memorize what BPMs sound like. Unfortunately, this post didn’t go according to plan at all. Part of…
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Know Your Tempos — Jimi Hendrix

August 8, 2021

I just realized that I haven’t done a “Know Your Tempos” post in months since I did my first one back in January. So here’s another one of these posts, shamelessly stolen from Todd Bishop. I think I’ll just start using a boilerplate description of what “Know Your Tempos” means: If you ever see some sheet music that…
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Know Your Tempos — Led Zeppelin

January 24, 2021

If you’re like me and you’ve ever made the mistake of watching Whiplash, you probably sent your palm through your forehead at the bit where Fletcher points to a metronome marking and tells Andrew to “count me a 215” before he starts going on about “I am to understand that you cannot read tempo?!” He also calls Andrew…
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