Skills

Build the drummer, not just the song. Lessons on reading, a catalogue of the patterns worth knowing by heart, and a notation editor to write your own and move them to and from your DAW.

Learn

Learn opens with Starting out, for the reader who has not yet sat at a kit: the lesson Before the first beat covers holding the sticks, which drum is which, counting to four, and a first playable example. Two more sections follow: Reading drum notation covers what the marks mean, how long a note lasts, dynamics and repeats; Time signatures covers how the two numbers of a time signature change the count, through simple and compound meters to odd ones. Every example is engraved by the app rather than scanned, so you can play any of them at the tempo you want. Short questions at the end of each lesson check that it stuck; See results shows how you did. Learn is on every plan.

Grooves

The Grooves page is the catalogue: the patterns worth knowing by heart, from a basic rock beat to second line, son clave, bossa, the half-time shuffle and jazz ride, plus fills. Search by name, tag or alias. Level and Family stay visible on the page; More filters opens Kind, Meter, Feel and Sort, and opens itself whenever a link already carries one of those; tag chips will appear there once the catalogue is larger. The five tabs are All, Catalogue, Mine, Song scores and Community.

Song scores are cards on the Grooves page, next to your grooves, under All and Mine. The Song scores tab shows only them. New score sits beside New groove at the top of the page, on every tab. The wheel on a score’s card shows the first bar that has notes in it. If you have made drills from a score, its card has a drills link, such as 3 drills, which opens those drills.

To rename or delete a score, open it. Its page has a pencil button and a bin button beside the name; the bin asks you to confirm. New score and renaming a score need the score editor (Pro). A score of your own can be deleted on any plan. A score a teacher shared with you shows on any plan, and you cannot rename or delete it. An account with no scores and no score editor sees the Song scores tab, and opening it shows an upgrade panel in place of the cards.

Every groove page plays the pattern at any tempo on either kit. Two buttons matter:

• Practise opens your own copy of the groove in read mode with the practice card ready. The first press makes a practice copy that lives outside your groove allowance and off the Grooves page; later presses find it. It joins your grooves, and spends one of the allowance, the first time you edit and save it. A groove or rudiment shorter than four bars is copied repeated to four (a one-bar groove four times over, up to eight bars for a sparse one), so a take of it holds enough notes to earn a rating; a fill is copied as written. Above the practice card, Your progress on the groove shows its ladder and rung, your takes, best and latest tiers and best tempo, and one line saying what the next tier takes — 60% of the notes on the beat to lock it in, 75% for the pocket, 90% at the notated tempo to master it. It updates as each take is saved, and Back to Practise returns to the hub.
• Open in Groove Studio makes a copy you can edit, rename and build on. A copy is a snapshot: later edits to the original never reach it, and the copy records where it came from.

Rate a groove with the stars. Star it to favourite it. Once you have practised one, its card and page carry your best tier and when you last played it.

A groove of your own can be renamed with the pencil beside its name, and deleted with the bin, from its page.

Publish a groove

Publishing is how a groove of your own reaches other drummers. It is open to every plan and spends nothing extra.

1. On a groove you own, press Publish….
2. Fill in the card other people will read: a summary, a level (beginner, intermediate or advanced), a family, up to ten tags, and an optional credit for the technique or the drummer a pattern is named after.
3. Tick the attestation: This is my own groove or a named technique. It is not a transcription of a song. Publish stays disabled until you do. Groove IO does not carry transcriptions of records, and this is where that line is drawn.
4. Press Publish.

The groove appears on the Community tab under your display name (or “a Groove IO drummer” if you have set none; see Your profile), where anyone signed in can play it, rate it, comment under it and copy it. Unpublish takes it back; copies people have already made stay theirs. Only grooves and fills can be published, never a score of a song. An admin can take a published groove down with a reason you will see on its page, and put it back.

Comments and reporting

Under a published groove, anyone who can read it can leave a comment: plain text, up to a thousand characters. Remove your own comment whenever you like; the groove’s owner can remove any comment on their groove.

Report a problem sits beside the credit on someone else’s published groove and on someone else’s comment. Pick a reason (spam, someone else’s song or transcription, abusive, or something else), add detail if it helps, and send. An admin sees it in a queue; you are told it has been received and nothing further.

Groove Studio

Groove Studio is the notation editor and the front door to everything you write. Its landing page offers New groove (every plan, within the groove allowance), New score (Pro), and Import MIDI file, then your own grooves and scores newest first.

A groove is a few bars: a beat, a fill, a pattern. A score is the notation for a whole song. Both are edited in the same editor; a score can be attached to a song as its notation.

The editor

Click a bar’s number to select it, and shift-click another to select the run between them. Three small buttons then appear above the selected bar: Insert a bar puts an empty bar straight after it, Duplicate puts a copy next to it, and Remove takes it out. With several bars selected they act on the whole run. Add bar in the toolbar always adds to the end of the score.

The editor works on eleven drum voices: kick, snare, closed, pedal and open hi-hat, three toms, crash, ride and ride bell. Place hits in each bar, mark accents and ghost notes, set the meter and tempo, and add repeat marks. Two tools are worth knowing early:

• Insert groove… splices any groove’s bars into the score you are writing at the cursor.
• Save bars as groove… cuts the selected bars out of a score as a groove of your own, and records the score it came from. It spends one of your groove allowance.

Leaving the editor with unsaved changes asks first. Read mode is the playable view; Edit in Groove Studio on a score’s page opens the editor on it.

Play it back

Every score and groove page has a transport. Play, set the speed, choose a Kit (see Drum kits) and, on a score, drag across the notation to loop a run of bars.

Share a link

Share link on a groove or score you can see mints a link anyone can open without an account. It shows the notation, plays it, offers Download MIDI, and names you as the sharer (with your playing style, years playing and bio as well, if you have opted into a public profile). Pressing the button twice returns the same link. Revoke link stops it; a revoked link says so rather than 404ing.

Download MIDI

Download MIDI sits in the header of every groove, every score in read mode, every warm-up routine (where it reads Download routine as MIDI) and every public share page. It is on every plan.

What comes out is the performance, not the page. Repeats are written out, because a MIDI file has no repeat marks and a DAW has to play what the drummer hears. Notes go on channel 10, the General MIDI percussion channel, on the standard drum map, so they land on any drum track without remapping. A tempo and a time signature are written at the start and wherever the meter changes; a warm-up routine is one file with a tempo change at each step. The file is written at 3360 ticks per quarter note, the score model’s own resolution, so triplets and every other tuplet position are exact rather than rounded. Dynamics travel as velocity: an accent is 112, a plain hit 80, a ghost note 30.

Get a groove into your DAW

1. Open the groove or score and press Download MIDI. The file is named after the document.
2. In your DAW, make a software-instrument track with a drum kit on it. Any General MIDI or GM-compatible kit reads the map above as is; a sampled kit with its own map will want its input remapped once, or the notes moved, which most DAWs do with a drum map or a transform.
3. Drag the .mid file onto that track. The tempo and meter events in the file will usually offer to set the project tempo; say yes if the project is empty and no if you are dropping a fill into an existing song.
4. To hear it on your electronic kit rather than in the DAW, route the track’s MIDI output to the module over the same USB cable it sends on. Most modules accept notes in and play them on their own sounds.

Get a groove from your DAW or e-kit into Groove IO

Play the pattern on the kit into a MIDI track in your DAW, or program it there, then export or drag the clip out as a Standard MIDI File. Format 0 and format 1 both import.

1. On the Groove Studio landing page, press Import MIDI file and choose the .mid or .midi file.
2. The dialog reads it and shows what it found: the bar count, the meter, the tempo, and a name seeded from the file name.
3. Read the Warnings. The import quantises each hit to the nearest slot on the finest grid that fits its bar, so a triplet stays a triplet and a sixteenth stays a sixteenth, and it tells you what it had to decide: hits it moved by more than a thirty-second, notes it read through an alias (a side stick as a snare, a second crash as the crash), notes on no drum it knows, and two hits on the same drum landing in one slot, of which one is dropped.
4. Choose where it lands. Save as groove is on every plan and spends one of your groove allowance; Save as score needs Pro. Eight bars or fewer defaults to a groove, longer to a score. Either way it opens in the editor.

Notes on channel 10 are read as the drums. A file with nothing on channel 10, which some e-kits and DAW exports produce, has every note read instead, and the dialog says so. The first tempo in the file becomes the document’s tempo; a file with no tempo or meter is read as 4/4 at the default. Velocity 100 and above comes in as an accent, 45 and below as a ghost note.

Tips for a clean import. Quantise in the DAW first if you played it loosely; the import snaps to the grid, but a hit that is genuinely between two slots lands on whichever is nearer. Keep the clip to whole bars. If your kit puts the hi-hat on notes Groove IO does not expect, the warning list will name them by their General MIDI names, and the kit map you can teach for live input does not apply to file import, so move those notes in the DAW.