Music Production Math: Tempo, Delay Times, Pitch, Sample Rates, Gain & Loudness

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn the song's BPM into milliseconds per beat and build a delay chart for straight, dotted and triplet note values that the engineer can type straight into a delay or reverb pre-delay.
• Convert an arrangement from bars into seconds, show the song length as m:ss with TEXT, plan the bars of a radio edit in whole 8-bar phrases and find the tempo that would make the current arrangement fit a target length.
• Calculate equal-temperament frequencies from MIDI note numbers with POWER, name every note with INDEX and MOD, measure how many cents a string is out of tune with LOG and find the nearest note to a kick drum's measured pitch.
• Calculate how many megabytes a minute of audio takes in five formats, size the whole EP session, find the highest frequency each sample rate can hold and how many minutes fit on a field-recorder card.
• Convert track peaks from dBFS into linear amplitude, calculate the gain change that brings each track to the house target, and estimate the drum bus level for worst-case (correlated) and typical (unrelated) summing.
• Calculate how much two fictional streaming platforms would turn each EP master up or down, the true peak that results, and flag every master that needs attention with IFS.
• Calculate the tempo ratio that fits each sample to the 124 BPM project, its new length, how many semitones its pitch would move if it were simply sped up (varispeed), and the speed factor for a transposition.
• Cost each production stage for the whole EP, turn the total studio hours into working days, find the last production day with WORKDAY and chart the hours per song by stage.