There are some questions being asked obviously by beginners. I should hope they are beginners. BPM. is Bars Per Minute and not beats per minute.
Waltz is 3/4 . Three beats to a bar. Foxtrot is 4/4 Four beats to a bar. Quickstep is 4/4 Four beats to a bar of music. Tango is supposed to be 2/4 but very often is played 4/4.
The speed at which these are played. There are recomended Tempos. But sometimes we are at the mercy of the music presenter.
After understanding the above. We would expect to dance to a certain amount of bars of music in one minute. In the Rumba , if you have a dated disk, straight of the disk it would probably be 27 to 29 BPM. If you have one of the latest disks, straight of the disk it will be 24 to 25 BPM.
To count the bars per minute. Looking at the second hand of your watch. For a Waltz you will count in this manner. 123 223 323 423 523 and so on. Foxtrot of course is 1234 2234 3234 4234 5234 Count this for one minute and you have the speed or tempo that the music is being played at.
If you are dancing and you think that the music is a bit fast, you are probably right. It isn't the first time, and won't be the last time that I've gone over to the person doing the music and asked if they have a speed control and if so why not use it. Hoping that they know what the tempo should be. We had a situation here where in a competition one of the judges had a dance rerun because of the music.

it's kind of funmy you say you hope the questions on the other thread are from beginners when you claim bpm stands for bars per minute. why don't you google: "define bpm" and see what you get. :)

also, to add to my previous comment, I believe the ballroom industry uses mpm and alternate dance styles like wc swing use bpm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats_per_minute

maybe luvlatin should stick to quicks and slows!!! :o)

The Imperial Society of teachers of Latin manual measures tempo in bars per minute. For example if there are 100 beats per minute in Rumba then you would divide it by 4 (4 beats per bar of music) and it would be 25 bars per minute. I have seen music tempo measured both ways. It is confusing that both have the same initials BPM.

A good music man at socials is a great asset. He will play highly rated music with the correct tempos. Our music man does competitions as a sideline. So, all of the music he plays is wonderful.
However, if we get a substitute dj, then he could play anything and at the wrong tempos--some tunes are down right not danceable.

You must not have any musician friends. To all musicians, and to dancers in the U.S.A., BPM stands for Beats Per Minute.

What the English call "bars", Americans refer to as "measures". Either term is technically correct, however, the use of the word "bars" can be confusing for a person in England, where the abbreviation for both is BPM. In the states, we can differentiate between the abbreviations BPM and MPM.

Dancers should also understand that measuring anything in Bars (or Measures) per minute is innaccurate at best, and misleading at worst. That's why musicians always use beats per minute.

Take, for example, Waltz and Foxtrot. Most people would assume that if both the Waltz and the Foxtrot have a tempo of 30 MPM, then they must be the same speed. But that would be wrong. A Waltz at 30 MPM is 25% slower than a Foxtrot at 30 MPM.

How is this possible? Because a Waltz has only 3 beats per measure, while a Foxtrot has 4. So if you have 30 measures in one minute of Waltz, multiplied by 3 beats in each measure, that's 90 beats total, or 90 BPM. Thats 25% slower than the Foxtrot having the same number of measures in one minute (30), multiplied by 4 beats in each measure, or 120 BPM.

This explanation would not be necessary if everybody just specified beats per minute. It's perfectly obvious that a Waltz at 90 BPM is slower than a Foxtrot at 120 BPM. It's more accurate AND more understandable.

Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
(musician/dancer)

Jonathon. All my dancing life as it is in my Modern technique book and also in my Latin technique book we see bars per minute. I can't see how anybody could count a Quickstep with beats per minute and find out that their Step Hop comes on the 15th bar which would be on the 58th beat. Possibly you may have a style of dancing that requires being counted in beats per minute. I don't know..
We have another style called New Vogue. This is very much bars per minute. Some of the dances are 16 bars phrased. Some are 32 bars phrased.
So if I wish to know what speed the music is being played at I count in bars for 15 seconds and multiply by 4. If I wish to be more accurate I will count for the full minute. It would be intesting to know if Wally Lairds book reaches the USA has this been rewritten to accomodate. Thinking. I fail to see how a singer who is asked to come in on the 15th bar of a song would be counting 12345 and so on up to 56. I see by some of the writtings that very little is known about eight bar phrasing. Most music or at least dance music is 8 bar phrased. Woops sorry 64 beats phrased. How does that song go."We Live in two Different Worlds ".

Luv,

I think you're confusing two ways/purposes of counting. Choreography (or a singer's entrance) might certainly be marked by bars/measures. Beats per minute is for determining the overall tempo/speed of the music, regardless of how many bars there are in the song or what you are doing during any particular bar.

You have two entirely different concepts confused. Tempo is simply an indication of the speed of the music. It has nothing to do with counting, phrasing, or measure numbers (other than how fast you're supposed to count).

When you talk about the tempo of a song, you're indicating nothing more than the speed. A song can be fast, medium, or slow, and none of this has any bearing on the total number of measures in the piece, or what measure number the singer might come in on. If the singer is to start on the 5th measure, the same will be true whether the song is 128 BPM or 192 BPM.

Take a look at a piece of sheet music. You will see a whole page (or many pages) of measures, and each one is numbered. This is the indication of meaures and measure numbers. Now look in the upper left-hand corner of the first page. You will see one of two things (or sometimes both): (1) A verbal description of tempo, such as adagio, andante, vivace, etc, and/or (2) a numeric indicator, such as 1/4 note = 144, which is always an indication of beats per minute.

What you should understand by looking at this is that the inner working of the song with all its measures, notes, roadmap, etc are the big picture, described by the musical score. But the tempo is a simple concept described by nothing more than a single number -- beats per minute.

Dancers and musicians count measure numbers all of the time, especially when composing or choreographing. But when indicating or interpreting a tempo, what you're describing is nothing more than the speed, and that's it. True, it can be expressed in terms of beats or measures, but for reasons I explained earlier (and as any musician will tell you), expressing tempo in terms of MPM is both less accurate and more misleading.

You can still talk about your Quickstep chasse starting on measure #15. (That's a choreography issue, and has nothing to do with tempo). But if you want to tell the band how fast to play a Quickstep, don't tell them 50. They'll play it about 1/4 as fast as you intended.

Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com