DJing With Tempo Changes and Metric Modulation
Last Updated: December 2nd, 2025
In the world of electronic music, genres often rely heavily on tempo as a defining trait. This is somewhat uncharacteristic of music in general; Rock & Roll, Jazz, or Hip-Hop are less rigidly defined by such technical attributes as they are the form or content of their message.
But in much of electronic music, the resounding message is: “Dance.”
The Role of Tempo in Electronic Music
As such, the boundaries created by tempo ranges and specific rhythms are an inherent and immutable part of what delineates the hundreds (if not thousands) of subgenres of electronic music. House lives at 128BPM; Drum & Bass thrives at or above 170BPM; Trap and Dubstep and other relatively novel subgenres occupy that dualistic space of half-time tempos that can be interpreted in wildly different ways on the dancefloor.
With this article, I hope to shed some light on an incredibly useful rhythmic technique – one borne of music theory and simple math, and employed heavily by musicians in technical genres such as Jazz, Metal, and Progressive Rock. But make no mistake, metric modulation has a place in dance music as well, and successfully pulling it off in a DJ set is a technical feat that can blindside, confound, and absolutely thrill your audience.
Curating a DJ Set
As DJs, our job is to curate: To collect sounds and songs with shared commonality but distinct elements that evoke different feelings and expressions of physicality on the dancefloor, into a cohesive set. In my own sets, I’ve always strived to not only steadily ramp up the music’s energy level, but to tell a story that ebbs and flows, drifting from emotionally introspective moments to aggression that urges – no, demands - an explosion of movement on the dancefloor.
Musicologists like to rouse the uninitiated in lectures with a simple question: “Why do we find music interesting?” The simple answer, backed by psychology, is something of a ‘eureka’ moment: “Because it defies or rewards our expectations.”
How many guitar solos have had you cock your neck, thinking, “Well, I didn’t expect that” at a particular modal inflection? Or to bring it back to electronic music, how is it that ‘the drop’ – that moment where carefully-built energy explodes with release – moves you so strongly? Because of a sudden or otherwise unexpected shift in the energy level, and the feeling it induced.
There is plenty of material in just about any given electronic genre to manipulate the energy level of a dancefloor without ever changing tempo. The staying power of certain rhythms, like two-step Garage or a simple quarter-note House beat, is a testament to their power.
Exploring Drum & Bass and Beyond
I am a long-time disciple of Drum & Bass – that belligerent, instigating monster that dwells around 174BPM, causing terminal gurning and rug-cutting dance moves for nearly three generations. I grew up playing along to the classic breakbeats on a drum kit, and I crave pummelling two-step rhythms and twisty filter-swept basslines.
But the more music I consume and the more sets I curate, the more I find myself foraying into less-familiar territory; the stories I tell with my sets enter new and exciting chapters, hopefully challenging the audience to dance to something unexpected. After all, that’s all of DJing – and indeed all of music.
Techniques for Changing Tempo Mid-Set
Given that tempo is an innate, defining attribute of any given electronic genre, and that manipulating energy levels is an inherent part of curating a distinctive set, it follows that deploying tempo changes in a DJ set can be a strikingly effective way to not only set yourself apart as a DJ, but to bridge genre communities and garner favour among new listeners.
There are a few ways to change tempo mid-set, some more seamless than others.
Baked-In Tempo Changes
The simplest is to find tracks that have tempo changes ‘baked in’, for example, a tune that starts as House but, during its breakdown, very noticeably slows down or speeds up to another tempo. These songs are pretty common, and I think it’s a good idea to keep a small playlist of them in your DJ software (along with notes in their metadata indicating the tempos at which they start and end, and memory locations indicating change points).
In cataloguing tracks like this, with the multitude of assists offered by modern DJing technology to ensure our mixes stay on time (and, therefore, free our minds to do more creative things), with enough experimentation, you can find a workflow and system that works best for you.
Using Pitch Faders
But with baked-in tempo changes, you’re still somewhat limited by the tempo ranges in the given song. Another way to go about things is to use your pitch faders; gone are the days when DJs were limited to +/-6% of a song’s native pitch.
Faders on modern controllers can have a user-defined range, allowing a DJ to stretch or compress a tune drastically. The problem is obvious: This often sounds like garbage, especially compounded by artifacting induced by ‘pitch lock’ algorithms that maintain a song’s key signature independent of its tempo.
Metric Modulation Explained
It may be a controversial opinion that DJs are Musicians, but I believe it, and as musicians, I think it behooves us to understand at least a modicum of music theory – it makes us better artists.
Enter metric modulation: a technique whereby one note value can be made to sound like – or indeed, become – another. Essentially, tempo is defined by the interplay of different rhythmic elements. What tells us a song is at House tempo is not necessarily the quarter-note kick drum playing on its own; it’s the other rhythmic elements of the song occurring at periodic intervals (hi-hats on the 1/8th notes or a clap on the 2 and 4, for example) that reinforce that we are hearing a song in common time at 128BPM.
When you remove all of those other rhythmic elements, there’s nothing necessarily left to indicate that the kick drum beat is actually playing quarter notes, because rhythm is all relative to itself. If you start to introduce entirely new rhythmic elements (for example, a dotted-eighth note percussion pattern), then you can begin to reinterpret the beat as a totally new rhythm.
Applying Metric Modulation in DJ Sets
This is a difficult concept to explain without demonstrating, so I’ll mention my most favourite way to deploy it: To get roughly from House tempo to Drum & Bass, or vice-versa – and I say roughly because mathematically it never quite works out to exact values – this is part of why DJ controllers with pitch faders that go into decimal places are extremely useful (there are also calculators online you can use to help find the approximate values for what tempo you will end up at).
Say you have a House track with a vocal element, and are approaching a breakdown where the beat disappears, leaving the naked a cappella. The Loop feature is a boon to modern DJing for many reasons, and most controllers include a sub-feature that lets you press a single button to engage a loop of a defined number of beats. In this case, we’re going to grab some enticing short part of that vocal and loop it at a rate of one dotted-eighth note.
Pause for dramatic effect, let it play out a bit – you’ve got the audience in the palm of your hand. Hopefully, you’ve already cued up the drum intro to a tune at roughly Drum & Bass tempo already. Drop that tune and see how those dotted-eighth notes have magically become quarter notes, as redefined by the kick and snare of the Drum & Bass tune.
Examples of Metric Modulation in Electronic Music
My favourite example, one that closely illustrates the “dotted notes into quarter notes” scenario I described above, is The Dirtyphonics remix of Polygon by ShockOne.
It starts at Drum & Bass tempo, and breaks down to a lone dotted-note synthesizer rhythm. Another beat kicks in, redefining that rhythm as eighth notes, cascading into a beautiful Breakbeat/House drop that then does the inverse on the second breakdown, ending up as Drum & Bass again. It’s a beautiful song and a great tool for demonstrating this concept.
Another example is when DJ software misreads a track’s tempo due to strong triplet rhythms, such as analyzing a Dubstep tune at 140BPM as 105BPM or 210BPM. Clever DJs can leverage this phenomenon to manipulate rhythm and surprise the dancefloor.
Gear Recommendations for Getting into DJing
Beginner DJ Controller Gear Recommendations
There are a few entry-level offerings from the three major players (Pioneer, Denon, and Native Instruments) that are more than suitable. Recommended controllers include:
- Pioneer DDJ-Rev1 2-Channel Battle Controller with Serato DJ Lite
- NI Traktor Kontrol S4 MK3 DJ Controller
- Numark Party Mix II DJ Controller with Built-in Light Show
Intermediate DJ Controller Gear Recommendations
- AlphaTheta DDJ-GRV6 4-Channel Performance DJ Controller
- Roland DJ-707M 4-Channel Controller for Mobile DJs
- Denon DJ Prime Go+ Standalone DJ Controller
Turntables & Vinyl
- Technics SL1200MK7 Turntable with Coreless Direct Drive Motor
- Reloop RP-7000 MK2 High-Torque Turntable
- Audio-Technica AT-LPW50BT-RW Manual Belt-Drive Turntable with Bluetooth
Headphones
Laptop Stands
- Yorkville Aluminum Folding Laptop Stand LS-1
- Samson Heavy Duty Laptop Tripod Base Stand
- Uncaged Ergonomics RISE Swivel Adjustable Laptop Desk Stand
Zack Szamosvari (AKA Opposing Force) has been DJing for nearly 15 years; currently he spins all manner of Bass Music, releasing periodic ‘OPERATIONS’ mixes viewable and downloadable at youtube.com/@OpForMusic. In 2009 Zack graduated from Fanshawe College’s Music Industry Arts and Audio Post-Production programs. He has been with Long & McQuade since April of 2023, working in the Pro Audio department at the Bloor Street location in Toronto. Zack has several side hustles as a photographer, location sound recordist/boom operator, writer, venue sound technician and bouncer, but DJing is his primary passion.
