In that misty magical moment of inspiration, usually occurring around 3 AM on a day when you need to wake up at 8 AM, you’ve picked up your guitar and spilled out a miraculous new riff. With your guitar face still on, you turn on your bedroom studio computer in an attempt to record the precious musical material and save it from the oblivion of the morning to come.
But things are never easy in the audio recording world. You press record and the metronome in your DAW starts playing at it’s own default tempo, threatening to totally mess up your flow. What to do? What’s the proper tempo setting for recording your riff? Oh my God, you probably forgot how to play the riff!
Hey!
Chill out, read the article, grab the free plug-ins listed on the page and tap that tempo in.
TapTempo by Soma
This is one simple plug-in. Tap the tempo using your mouse or a MIDI key, and the resulting BPM value will be shown on the panel. As far as I could understand, it was supposed to automatically update your host’s BPM, but the current version of the plugin fails to do so in my host.
TapTempo’s simple looks
The auto-update feature would be interesting for live use, but for simple recording purposes, this plug-in suffices as is. On a side note, all Soma’s plugs were designed for use with energyXT, but I’ve had no problems loading them in other hosts.
Download TapTempo: click here (1 MB download size, ZIP archive, 32-bit VST for Windows)
Tap! by Sonic Assault
This plug-in is almost as simple as the previous one (which is good). The GUI looks a bit more advanced, but the features are the same, more or less. Tap the tempo using your mouse, and the algorithm calculates the average BPM based on your last four taps.
Tap! – Now, this is one busy GUI
You can turn on the built in metronome if you wish, which may be a useful bonus sometimes. The host auto-sync feature is a bit buggy, same as with the previous plug-in. The developers say it’s host dependant, so you will have to test it yourself. Also, as I said, the GUI is a bit more complex, but I kind of prefer TapTempo’s simplicity.
Download Tap!: click here (1.6 MB download size, ZIP archive, 32-bit VST plugin for Windows)
So there you go, two tap tempo plug-ins, both free. No clear winner here, so you should probably test them both and pick your favorite. Oh crap, the article was so long you’ve probably already forgotten how that new riff went.
