Tempo & rhythm
Tempo bridge
A tempo bridge is a track played to move a set from one tempo neighbourhood to another — fast enough to follow what came before, slow enough to lead into what comes next, so the change never happens in one jump.
Measured in our catalog
Between the house shelf at 128 BPM and the 140 where psy-trance and dubstep sit, the catalog holds 45,148 tracks at 132–138 BPM — 9.9% of everything with a detected tempo.
Thin, but not empty: 45,148 records is a large crate to cross a gap with, and every one of them is reachable from 128 or from 140 on a fader alone. The tempos in between are where the crossing is made, and they are the ones almost nobody browses by.
| Tempo | Tracks |
|---|---|
| 131 BPM | 3,899 |
| 132 BPM | 9,976 |
| 133 BPM | 4,095 |
| 134 BPM | 5,511 |
| 135 BPM | 7,010 |
| 136 BPM | 4,820 |
| 137 BPM | 2,629 |
| 138 BPM | 11,107 |
| 139 BPM | 1,383 |
Measured on 11 August 2026 across public tracks with a detected BPM, bucketed by round(bpm). Method: how we correct half-time BPM detection.
Why it matters
Tempo neighbourhoods are real places with gaps between them. House and tech house sit in one, trance and dubstep in another, and a set that wants to visit both has to cross the ground in between or make the jump in a single transition and hope nobody notices.
The bridge is the record that makes the crossing cheap. It usually belongs to neither neighbourhood, which is why it rarely turns up in the crates you build by genre, and why the tempo pages are a better place to look for one than a genre page is.
Frequently asked
How do you move a DJ set from 128 to 140 BPM?+
In stages rather than in one move. Play through the tempos in between — the catalog holds tens of thousands of tracks at 132 to 138 — so each transition stays inside a fader range and the room never feels the gear change.
How much can you raise the tempo across a set?+
As much as you like if you take it gradually. Across sets sequenced by hand here the median gap between two adjacent tracks is 1.0 BPM and 81.5% land within 3, so the climb happens over a whole set rather than in any one transition.
What makes a good bridge track?+
Something with a sparse, rhythm-led outro at a tempo neither neighbourhood owns. The less melodic material it has at the end, the less there is to clash with whatever you are bringing up underneath it.
Related terms
BPM
BPM — beats per minute — counts how many beats land in sixty seconds. It is the first number a DJ checks, because two tracks have to agree on tempo before anything else about them matters.
Pitch fader
The pitch fader is the slider that speeds a track up or slows it down, usually by up to 6 or 8 percent. It is how two records are brought to the same tempo before they are mixed.
Energy curve
An energy curve is the shape a set makes over time — where it starts, how steeply it climbs, where it peaks. It is the plan behind a running order, and the thing a crowd feels without being able to name.
Half-time
Half-time is a groove that feels half as fast as it counts — the snare lands every other bar instead of every other beat. Drum & bass written at 174 BPM is felt, and often detected, at 87.
Explore: Every tempo in the catalog · Tracks at 132 BPM · Mixing guides · All DJ terms