Delay time comes from tempo, not from taste. A quarter note at 120 BPM is 500 ms, at 128 BPM it is 469 ms, and at 90 BPM it is 667 ms. Everything else in the table follows from that one number.
The three forms of every division
Straight is the note itself. Dotted is the note plus half again, and triplet is two thirds of it. All three are listed for every division from a whole note down to a sixty-fourth, so a 1/16 triplet is read rather than worked out.
Choosing a division
Slap and doubling live between 40 and 120 ms, which is a 1/32 or 1/16 at most tempos. A 1/8 repeat sits under a vocal without competing with it. A dotted 1/8 interleaves with a straight eighth part, and a 1/4 repeat answers the phrase rather than thickening it.
Reverb pre-delay and decay
Pre-delay is the gap before the reverb starts. Setting it to a 1/64 or 1/32 keeps the tail out of the way of the transient, which is what stops a snare from sounding smeared.
For decay, a tail that ends before the next chord change stays out of the harmony. One bar at 120 BPM is 2000 ms, so a decay near 1.8 s clears the bar with a little room. The table’s whole note row is that bar length in 4/4.
Samples, and why they are here
The samples column is the same delay counted in whole samples at the chosen rate. It is what you type into a tool that shifts by samples rather than by time, such as aligning a duplicated track or compensating a plugin’s reported latency. A 5 ms offset is 240 samples at 48 kHz and 221 at 44.1 kHz, which is why the sample rate has to be set before the number is used.
Example: 128 BPM
A quarter note is 468.75 ms. The dotted eighth is 351.56 ms, the 1/16 is 117.19 ms, and the 1/16 triplet is 78.13 ms. At 48 kHz the quarter note is 22,500 samples.
Feedback works on the same grid. A repeat every 351.56 ms at 40% feedback gives roughly 7 audible repeats before the level falls 60 dB, which runs a little past one bar.