❤️ Pulse vs Tempo ⏰ Explained

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]We experience music through time, and anything [music] that exists through time has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Because we know when the music starts [music] and ends, we can start to understand what the music is doing while it is playing. Pulse is super important [music] because what happens to the pulse will affect everything else in the music. Each of the beats in a pulse has the same amount of time between them as every other beat. Let's try clapping a pulse now.

[00:00:32]>> [music] [music] >> Pulse is affected by the time signature of the music. The time signature tells you how many beats there are within a bar of music. We can change our pulse to follow a time signature by making some of the beats louder and others softer.

[00:00:58]We call the loud beats strong beats and the quiet beats weak beats. The strongest beat is beat one, so that beat is always louder than the others. Now, let's move on to tempo.

[00:01:11]Tempo affects the pulse and it changes its speed. The tempo tells you how fast or slow the pulse is. For example, a clock ticks once every second. Because there are 60 seconds in a minute, we can call this speed 60 beats per minute. If we set a metronome to this number, the metronome will tick just like a clock does. However, if we make the number on the metronome bigger, the metronome will not tick at the same speed as a clock anymore.

[00:01:43]Making the number bigger makes the pulse faster. When we speed up the tempo, we are making the length of time shorter between each beat of the pulse. And when we make the number on the metronome smaller, we are making the pulse slower by increasing the amount of time between each of the beats in the pulse.

[00:02:05]In fact, [music] tempo is an Italian word and it literally means time. So, it's no surprise that time is something we need to consider as very important in order for music to make sense to us.