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Find out whether you actually hit it. A microphone or an electronic kit grades every take per drum against the score, and the answer is a number and a tier rather than a feeling.

Practising

A take is you playing along to a score while the app listens and grades every hit against the chart. The results are a straight answer: how much of it landed, how early or late you tend to run, and a tier.

The practice card

Open any score or groove copy you own and the practice card sits above the notation. It holds:

  • Start take, and the phase readout (Opening the microphone…, Counting in…, Play along).
  • The Input picker: Microphone or MIDI (e-kit).
  • The count-in toggle: the numerals are always shown; the toggle adds clicks through your speakers. The take itself stays silent so the app hears only you.
  • A level meter (microphone) or an activity strip of the eleven drums lighting up as you hit them (MIDI).
  • The last take on this chart, and a link to the Practise hub.

When the take ends, the results panel opens in the same card. The tiers, from the bottom: Finding the beat, Getting there, Locking in, In the pocket, and at the top Rock god! (the top tier is named for your instrument). A take shorter than sixteen expected hits is scored but not tiered. Below the headline: notes played, timing and tightness, then Show the full readout for the hit-by-hit detail, and on a MIDI take a By drum table.

A calibrated take saves itself to your record the moment the results appear, and the card says Saved to your report. Every plan can score and save three takes a week; Pro lifts the limit. Once a Free plan’s three are spent for the week, Start take is disabled and names the day the next one is back. The takes list and report are open to everyone.

Calibrate your microphone

A microphone take needs to know two things about your room: how loud a hit is compared with the background, and how long sound takes to get from the speakers to the mic and back. Calibration measures both, and it lives at Practise → Setup.

  1. Choose the input device. Use the same one every time; a calibration is tied to the input it was measured on, and the page says so if you switch. Prefer the laptop’s own microphone over an input on your audio interface unless your mic is actually plugged into the interface: the page warns when an input is on a device that is also an output, because opening it can interrupt other apps playing through that interface, such as a drum module, until they reopen the device. The microphone stays off until you press Start monitoring or Calibrate, and Stop monitoring hands it back.
  2. Stay quiet. Two seconds of nothing. This measures the room, so hits can be told apart from it.
  3. Play eight hits. Ordinary hits at the level you actually play at, not a demonstration. The gate is set from these; if you calibrate softly and then play hard, or the other way round, the results will say Recalibrate at the level you actually play at.
  4. Turn the volume up. Speakers, not headphones, then stay quiet. Twenty clicks go out through the speakers and back in through the mic, and the round trip is what lets the app place your hits in time.

The summary at the top of the page reads Calibrated when both halves are done, and warns when a calibration may be stale. On the practice card an uncalibrated microphone gets a take that shows whether you were heard but not your timing, and it is not saved; the card also carries its own Calibrate button, which opens these same steps in place, right under the card, so you never have to leave the page. Practise → Setup still holds the panel, for redoing a calibration or checking it after switching inputs.

If nothing is heard. The take’s results will say Nothing was heard. Check the browser has permission to use the microphone, that the right input is selected, and that the level meter moves when you hit. Microphone diagnostics under the full readout shows what arrived. Headphones are fine for the take itself; only the timing step needs speakers.

Connect an e-kit over MIDI

An electronic kit’s module already knows exactly when you hit, which drum, and how hard, and every module sold in the last decade sends that over USB as MIDI. Reading it directly gives the app exact hits with drum identity and dynamics, and it means no microphone calibration: there is no level to gate and no round trip to measure. It can’t tell how late this computer plays a song’s sound, so run the timing check below once on each computer.

What you need. A module with a USB socket, or a USB-MIDI cable on its 5-pin MIDI OUT, and Chrome or Edge. Firefox works once its MIDI site permission is installed; the app will tell you when that is the thing standing in the way. Safari cannot read MIDI, and the picker says so rather than failing quietly. On a Mac with only Safari, the fallback is the module’s own line-out into your microphone input, scored the ordinary way.

First time.

  1. Plug the module in and switch it on before opening the score. Most modules are class-compliant and need no driver; if yours shipped with one for your operating system, install it first.
  2. On the practice card, set Input to MIDI (e-kit). The browser asks once whether the site may use MIDI devices; allow it. Nothing asks until you choose MIDI, so a page load never prompts.
  3. With one input connected it is selected for you; with more than one, a port dropdown appears. No MIDI input found means the browser cannot see the module: check the cable, that the module is on, and that no other application has the port exclusively.
  4. Hit a pad. The activity strip lights the drum it mapped to. If every pad you hit lights the right drum, you are done; press Start take.

Teach the kit map if a pad lights the wrong drum, or the strip shows an unmapped count. General MIDI is the default map and most modules speak it (Roland’s hi-hat notes are already known), but plenty of kits put their extra pads, second crash or hi-hat variants somewhere else. Go to Practise → Setup and find the MIDI (e-kit) section.

  1. Connection. Choose the MIDI input. Hits arriving names every incoming note with its General MIDI name and the drum it maps to, and lists any Unmapped notes. Play every pad once and read the list.
  2. Kit map. Press Learn kit map. The page prompts for the eleven drums in turn: “Hit the kick”, “Hit the snare”, then the closed hi-hat, open hi-hat, hi-hat pedal, high tom, mid tom, floor tom, crash, ride and ride bell. Hit the pad for each; press Skip for any your kit does not have. The map is shown as a table when you finish.
  3. Save for this kit. The map is remembered for that module, by its name and manufacturer, on this device. Reset to General MIDI goes back to the default.

If your module sends the same note for open and closed hi-hat and uses the pedal to tell them apart, the map notices when you teach both to one note and reads the hi-hat pedal position instead: pressed past the usual border counts as closed.

Timing check. Run it once on each computer you use. You play the snare on every click for 16 bars, and it measures how far this computer’s sound runs from what the kit sends, then sets your song timing offset to match. You will find it in Get started → Your sound and under Practise → Setup, in the MIDI (e-kit) section; press Start. If the hits are too uneven to measure, nothing changes and you can play it again. Use the speakers or headphones you play songs through. Check again repeats it any time.

Offset (optional) is for Bluetooth MIDI, or for hits that read consistently early or late. A wireless link adds ten to thirty milliseconds and some jitter; over USB there is nothing to correct. Press Measure. You are counted in for two bars at the clicks’ own tempo, so you arrive in time rather than spending the first few clicks finding it, and the run is drawn while it happens: a tick for every count and every click, a playhead crossing them, and a dot appearing under the ticks for each hit as it lands. Play a single pad on every click, any pad, mapped or not. The page shows the median delay it heard and applies it only when you press Use this offset. Because you are inside the measurement, the number includes your own tendency, and the page says so. An offset is only ever a delay, from 0 to 100 ms: if the clicks arrive ahead of your hits there is nothing to apply, and a link more than 100 ms behind is worth fixing rather than correcting for. The Manual offset field with Apply takes a figure you already know for your link. Clear offset returns to zero.

The status line reads Not connected until a port is chosen, then Ready: General MIDI map, offset 0 ms, or Ready: learned map, offset +18 ms (measured) once you have taught it or set an offset. Connecting has no pass or fail.

Reading a MIDI take. Scoring is per drum: a kick is matched against kicks, a snare against snares. A hit on the wrong drum counts as an extra and the stroke it displaced as a miss, and the results show how many such pairs there were. Open against closed hi-hat, or ride against bell, is matched within its family and noted separately without affecting the score. The By drum table shows expected, hit, early, late, missed and extras for each voice. A MIDI take is marked as one in the takes list.

Two refusals worth knowing. Nothing the kit map recognised means hits arrived but none mapped to a drum: teach the map. The browser’s clock could not place your hits means the browser did not give the app a trustworthy link between the MIDI timestamps and the audio you were hearing; the take is shown but not saved, because the error would be comparable to the whole grading window. Reload the page and try again, and if it persists, use a different browser.