What BPM is drum and bass? Jungle, liquid and neuro tempos

By Mike Farina · 29 September 2026

Drum and bass runs at roughly 160 to 180 BPM, and most modern tracks sit between 170 and 176, with 174 the tempo you'll see most. Older jungle is often a bit slower, around 160 to 170. Because the drums are felt in half-time, software sometimes reports the same tracks at 85 to 88 BPM.

That's the short version, and it holds for most of what you'll hear in a DnB set today. The longer version is that the tempo crept up over the 90s, settled, and has stayed remarkably stable since. Subgenres differ more in drum programming and sound design than in BPM.

What BPM is drum and bass?

If you're starting a track and just want a number, use 174. It's the default a lot of producers reach for and it mixes cleanly with most current releases. Anything from 170 to 176 will sit in a DJ set without anyone noticing, and a DJ can ride the pitch fader across that gap easily.

These are conventions from the scene, not rules. Plenty of good records sit at 168 or 178.

One practical note: whatever you pick, set it before you start chopping breaks. Sampled drums warped to 174 behave differently from drums you've repitched to get there, and changing the project tempo later means redoing every chop.

Drum and bass BPM by subgenre

You'll notice most rows land in the same place. That's the point. DnB DJs mix across subgenres all night, so producers keep the tempo close enough that a liquid track can follow a neuro one.

Why does DnB sound slower than 174?

The kick and snare pattern is what your body locks to. In a classic two-step DnB beat, the snare lands on beats 2 and 4 of a bar at 174, which means you can nod your head at 87 and feel completely at home. The bass often moves at that slower pulse too, while the hats and ghost notes carry the speed.

Halftime takes this further by putting one snare per bar on beat 3. At 174, that feels like an 87 BPM hip hop beat, even though the track is still counted and mixed at 174.

Why does my BPM detector say 87?

It's counting the slow pulse instead of the fast one. Tempo detection looks for the strongest regular pattern in the audio, and in DnB the heavy kick and snare can win over the hats. Both readings describe the same track, so just double it. The same thing happens in reverse with slow hip hop reading as 180. Why your BPM reads half or double explains how to decide which one to keep.

For a DnB library I'd always store the 170-something figure. That's what every DJ expects, and it's what the rest of your crate will say.

How has drum and bass tempo changed?

Very roughly: breakbeat hardcore in the early 90s ran well below where DnB sits now, jungle pushed the tempos up into the 160s, and by the late 90s the music had settled around 170 to 175. It has barely moved since. Dates and numbers here are broad strokes; individual records were all over the place, especially in the jungle years when producers were still pitching up sampled breaks by ear.

That pitching is worth knowing about if you sample old breaks. Speeding up a break on a sampler or turntable raises its pitch by the same ratio, which is part of why jungle drums have that tight, bright character. If you want the tempo without the pitch shift, you need time-stretching in your DAW instead.

Is 140 BPM drum and bass?

No. By convention 140 is dubstep, grime and a lot of UK bass music. A DnB track slowed down to 140 would sound sluggish, and a dubstep track at 140 will often read as 70 on a detector for the same half-time reasons as above. If you're halfway between (150 to 160), you're probably making something closer to footwork, jungle-leaning breaks or a tempo experiment, which is fine, just don't expect it to slot into a standard DnB set.

Mixing DnB tracks at different tempos

DJs nudge the pitch to match. Going from a 172 track to 174 is a speed change of about 1.2%. With keylock off, that also raises the pitch by about 20 cents, a fifth of a semitone. Most people won't notice on drums, but on a liquid track with long pads you might hear it clash with the next record if they're in neighbouring keys. Harmonic mixing covers how to keep that under control.

If you're setting up delays for a 174 track, a quarter note is 344.8 ms, an eighth is 172.4 ms and a dotted eighth is 258.6 ms. The full chart is in BPM to milliseconds.

How to check the BPM of a drum and bass track

Tapping along at 174 is hard work, and most people drift. Tap on the snare instead, which gives you about 87, then double it. Your DAW's tempo detection on import will usually get it right, and so will a DJ app when it analyses your library.

You can also drop the track on the keyandbpm analyser. It reports the tempo with a confidence figure, the key and the tuning, and draws beat marks under the waveform that you can play against to check the grid. Everything runs in the browser, so nothing gets uploaded.