What delay time should I start with?

Answer

Understand

This value tells you whether your chosen delay repeats on quarter notes, eighths, dotted eighths, triplets, or whole bars relative to the song's tempo, which is genuinely useful information for a rhythmically musical delay. It is not a claim about the "correct" or "best" delay setting for your mix: taste, the source material, and the rest of the arrangement all matter beyond this one number, and different DAWs may label these divisions or apply latency compensation differently.

Worked examples

At 120 BPM, a quarter-note delay is 500.0 ms, since a quarter note's duration is the full beat duration (60000 / 120 = 500). A dotted eighth note at the same 120 BPM is 375.0 ms: an eighth note is half a beat (250 ms), and the dotted modifier multiplies that by 1.5.

Method and limitations

quarterMs = 60000 / BPM. Multiply by the note's duration in quarter notes: whole = 4, half = 2, quarter = 1, eighth = 1/2, sixteenth = 1/4. A dotted modifier multiplies by 3/2; a standard triplet modifier multiplies by 2/3. The result keeps full internal precision and rounds only for display: one decimal place under 100 ms, whole milliseconds at or above 100 ms. This method is independent of any specific DAW's own delay-time labeling.

Reading the related-division table

Every division in the table below is derived from the same single BPM value, so it doubles as a quick reference for how far apart neighboring rhythmic divisions actually sit in milliseconds at your current tempo: a straight eighth versus a dotted eighth versus an eighth-note triplet can look similar on paper but produce noticeably different delay character once you hear them against the same source. Scanning the table before committing to a single value is often more useful than the single headline number alone.

Next decisions