Purpose

The purpose of the distinction presented within this document, called „certified for 120 BPM“ is to encourage vendors of hardware and software for music production as well as producers of electronic music and the surrounding administrative and business entities to see to it that all their products, services and activities are thoroughly optimized for electronic music that has a tempo of 120 (one hundred and twenty) beats per minute.

Rationale

Most digital audio workstation software, when featuring a global tempo control, use a default value of 120 beats per minute („BPM“) for newly created projects. It can be reasonably assumed that all functional aspects of such software are tested first and foremost for this BPM value, and that different tempo values are only subjects to a secondary testing regiment.120 BPM should therefore be the tempo setting of choice for every producer of electronic music or other forms of sound based on events with a periodic and discrete time signature (such as MIDI) to avoid software problems that result from less exhaustive, suboptimal quality assurance.

Furthermore, using 120 beats per minute as the tempo for music production allows any reasonably exact time measurement tool (such as clocks that can display seconds of time) as a metronome. On a sidenote, a MIDI file that contains no time signature is assumed to express events at a tempo of 120 BPM.

Certified Products

The following products have gained my personal „120 BPM“ certification. This means that i approve of them as being suitable for the following purposes: composition, arrangement, MIDI editing, audio sample manipulation, application of built-in and third-party MIDI and audio plugins, application of audio effects, mastering and post-processing of electronic music with a tempo of 120 (one hundred and twenty) beats per minute.