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User guide / Structure

Structure

Know what to practise, and watch it add up. Warm-up routines that run themselves, ladders that read your takes and suggest the next groove and the tempo to try it at, and a record of every take.

Warm-ups

Warm-ups ships six routines: a short and a full version each for every day, before a gig and before practice. Every plan can run and copy them; Free keeps one routine of its own, Pro as many as you like. A routine is an ordered list of steps, each one groove’s bars at a tempo, played a number of times. Press play once: each step counts you in and the routine moves on by itself, ramping from a comfortable tempo to an uncomfortable one. Singles, doubles, paradiddles, moving accents and rolls.

While a step plays, a counter beside its name shows how many passes of the bar are left, so you can stop in the right place before the next count-in. With Rate my warm-up on, each step’s row picks up a small rating as it finishes, and when the routine ends the page shows the full verdict for every step and then one for the whole routine. On an e-kit the drum chips light under the transport as you play, with any Unmapped notes counted beside them, and each MIDI step’s verdict adds a Wrong drum count and says how many notes came from pads the kit map has no drum for — so a low step tells you whether it was the wrong pad, an untaught pad or your timing. Every run you play to the end is saved to your history, rated or not: the routine page’s foot lists your Last five runs with their date and tier (Played for a run with no tier), and the Practise hub’s Report tab shows Warm-ups this week — how many runs, and how many minutes.

The shipped routines are read-only, though a teacher can still Share one with a student. Make a copy turns one into yours; New routine starts from nothing. In the editor, set the name, the occasion and a summary, then build the steps: Add step picks any groove with at least one bar, including your own, and appends it at its own tempo played four times. Drag steps to reorder them; each row carries a tempo (20 to 300), a Play N times count (1 to 64), an optional note and Remove. A routine holds at most forty steps, and the length shown beside Save is worked out from the steps as they stand. Download routine as MIDI exports the whole routine as one file.

Rudiments

Rudiments in the sidebar’s Practise group lists the forty international drum rudiments in their four families: rolls, diddles, flams and drags. Search by name or by the name you know it by (ruff, buzz roll, singles), narrow by family or level, and open one to see it engraved with its sticking written under every stroke. Flams and drags are drawn as grace notes and played as them; the buzz roll is drawn as a tremolo and played as a buzz. Every rudiment is written open, at a slow tempo, with every stroke on the page.

Click anywhere on a card to open the rudiment’s page. Practise there opens it on the practice card like any groove: your strokes are scored against the written ones. The scorer hears strokes, not hands, so the sticking is shown and not graded, and a grace note is not a stroke it expects. A take on a rudiment appears in the Practise hub’s Takes and Report tabs under the rudiment’s name, and the Report tab adds a line, Rudiments this week, with the takes, the minutes and how many different rudiments you have played. Rudiments are open on every plan and count against the same weekly allowance of scored takes. Download MIDI writes the strokes and leaves the grace notes out.

Challenges and ladders

Six ladders order the catalogue, easiest first: First beats — Hats alone, Kick on 1 and 3, Snare on 2 and 4, First eighth-note beat, all at 70 bpm, for the very first session — then Backbeat (basic rock beat to linear funk), Latin (tresillo to second line), Swing and shuffle, Feel, and Fills. Every catalogue groove and fill is on exactly one rung; rudiments have their own section.

Challenges are worked out from your takes, on the page, and each comes with a reason. Start here points a new account at the foot of the first ladder. Push the tempo offers the same groove five bpm faster than your last take once you are in the pocket. Lock it in sends a take below the pocket back to the notated tempo, and says what the pocket takes: three quarters of the notes on the beat. Next rung appears once a rung is mastered, which takes the top tier and the notated tempo, because an immaculate run at half speed is not the groove learned. New ground opens the next ladder when one is finished.

Challenges in the sidebar lists every challenge, then every ladder drawn as its rungs with your standing on each (Mastered, In progress, Not yet) and a Practise button per rung. It is open on every plan. A line under the heading says how many of your three free takes are left this week, or, once they are spent, when the next one is back.

The Practise hub

Practise in the sidebar opens the hub. Five tabs:

  • Overview: what to play next (the same Continue and Challenges as Home), this week’s takes, minutes and streak, and your five most recent takes. Every item ends in a Practise button.
  • Takes: every take, newest first, with the score it was played on, the tier or accuracy, the timing tendency, and whether it was a mic or MIDI take. Filter by input.
  • Report: totals, a twelve-week bar row, the streak, and a table of everything you have practised with the best and latest tier, the best tempo you have held at In the pocket or above, and when you last played it. Each row links back to the groove or score. Weeks start on Monday, in UTC.
  • Your playing: what your takes say about your playing, as a short list of findings with the numbers behind each. See below.
  • Setup: microphone calibration and the MIDI (e-kit) section.

Overview, Takes, Report and Setup are open on every plan; Free’s three scored takes a week are what the Takes and Report tabs fill up with. Your playing is part of Pro and above; on Free the tab shows greyed out with a Pro badge, and its page leads to the upgrade.

Your playing

Your playing reads every take you have saved and says what stands out: first what to work on, then your strengths, then notes. Each finding carries the numbers it comes from.

  • Timing: whether you tend to rush or drag (an average of 10 ms or more ahead of or behind the beat), and how tight your timing is (how far your hits spread within a take, on average across your takes).
  • Subdivisions: when the share of your notes that land on the beat on one grid, such as sixteenths, falls ten points or more below your best grid, that grid is named, with a link to the grooves in that feel.
  • Grooves and fills: whether your fills land as many notes on the beat as your grooves.
  • Hands and feet: from e-kit takes only, whether your kick lands later than your hands, or your feet land fewer notes on the beat than them, with a link to the First beats ladder. A microphone hears the kit as one sound, so it cannot tell your hands from your feet.

A finding appears only once there is enough to go on: five scored takes for timing (rush or drag also needs 200 notes on the beat), three takes on each of two subdivisions, three groove takes and three fill takes, and five e-kit takes with at least a hundred notes to play on each limb. While nothing has been found the tab says so, and below five takes how many more it needs; until an e-kit take has been heard it says that hands-against-feet findings need one. It never comments on technique: a microphone or an e-kit hears when and what you hit, not how you hit it.