Posted 8/5/25 10:40 pm
Day 2 of deeeaaadddd weeeeekkk…what this week needs is a little more tempo.
So let’s talk tempo! It’s the speed of a piece of music, and obviously that influences the speed of the movements in your choreography. Working with your music’s tempo (and picking music with the right tempo for your team) goes a long way towards good musicality and clean execution.
Musicians, producers, and DJs measure tempo in “beats per minute,” or BPM. You might know about the concept if you’ve ever measured your heart rate. It’s as simple as it sounds: count up the number of beats (or counts, in dance language) per minute, and you get a number.
Alright, disclaimer time. One person’s medium tempo is another person’s medium-fast tempo. Or what’s too fast for a kick routine might be great for a sassy jazz routine.
But overall, we can try to think of BPMs as falling within broad ranges of numbers. Like a BPM of 60 (which is 1 beat per second) is pretty darn slow in the music world, in almost any genre. Same for dance. Medium-ish could be the 90BPM – 120BPM range. Again I’m being super general…there’s no magic cutoff, even within the same style of music or dance category.
120 BPM (2 beats per second) is often labeled “moderate” on sheet music. But if you set your pom routine to 120, it’s way on the slow side.
A classic BPM in dance music (EDM, electronic music, whatever you want to call it) is 128. A lot of dance songs are around that tempo, especially songs from the “DJ era” of EDM (say, 2010-2015) when DJ Whatever-His-Name-Is had an easy time getting a #1 hit on pop radio. Or, DJ-adjacent songs with that kind of sound and beat…I’m lookin’ at you, Pitbull.
[Side note: I’m oversimplifying, but that whole sound can be roughly lumped within the “house music” category of dance music]
ANYHOW — 128 is pretty upbeat for your everyday listener. I mean, it’s the standard tempo for club-based dance music…the kind where the bass drum hits neatly on every count. It works well for jazz routines in the dance team world…but believe it or not, for pom, it’s still a smidge slow for competition (it’s probably good for halftime dances, though, where you have a variety of levels on your team).
Back when pom mixes were HUGE, when the top-tier teams came to me for music mixes, I’d set all songs in the mix to be 142 BPM. We could adjust up or down depending on the team and the choreo vision. A less experienced team? I’d set their mix in the mid-130s, and we’d usually speed it up as the season went along.
Many of the UDA pom mixes were set in the low-150s for tempo — really fast and demanding. It was super easy to lose crispness of execution at that tempo, even though the speed seemed to look and sound exciting. It took a very talented team to pull off that speed of music.
There’s a lot of asterisks and exceptions — notice I’m skipping hip hop in this simple post! — so let’s stick to just BPMs for now. Here’s the Top 10 on Spotify at the moment, plus a couple familiar classics mixed in.
Alex Warren “Ordinary”: 55 BPM. Unless you double-count it, which you shouldn’t. Instead of thinking / counting in terms of 110 beats per minute, I recommend sticking to the true 55 BPM and utilizing “and” counts.
Sheck Wes “Mo Bamba” 73. It’s the same tempo whether you’re blasting the real version in the car or the clean version in the student section on Friday night.
Chappell Roan “The Subway” 82
sombr “back to friends” 93. Dude needs a pumpkin spice latte.
WizTheMc “Show Me Love” 107
Justin Bieber “DAISIES” 110-111 (remember, we’re looking at literal speed, and not energy or how busy the songs or beats are. This one also throws in the quirk of being in a shuffle rhythm, which I’ll explain in another post)
Ravyn Lenae “Love Me Not” 115
Sabrina Carpenter “Manchild” 123
Teddy Swims “Bad Dreams” 125
Black Eyed Peas “I Gotta Feeling” 128
Tate McRae “Just Keep Watching” 130. This one’s for the York dancers (you’ll know what I mean if you check out this week’s podcast interview)
BLACKPINK “JUMP” 145. Sounds fast, feels fast, IS fast. But in the 2000s, this would be a “pretty fast” tempo for pom mixes danced by the more advanced teams.
Today’s random pic: Lake Zurich at the elite UDA camp at Pheasant Run in St Charles, June 2018. OK, not the nicest venue, but they always had some top-tier teams. Side note, I’ll always remember Pheasant Run for its UDA events and an amazing show by comedian Jeff Foxworthy.
Hopefully none of these redneck hypotheticals applies to you… Warning: early ’90s fashion and hair.