Tools

Everything a practice room needs, on the laptop you already have: your songs and their charts in time with your own audio, loops on the bar that keeps beating you, and two drum kits to play back on.

Songs

A song is a chart and the audio you play it against. The Songs page is the library: search it, sort it, star what you are working on.

Add a song

1. Press Add song on the Songs page or Home.
2. Type the title and artist. Look this title up searches MusicBrainz and Spotify and fills in the album, year, cover art and, where it can, links to a drumless clip and the full song on YouTube. Check what it found; you can edit any of it.
3. Attach the sheet music PDF if you have it. It is optional, and you can add one later from the song page.
4. Save. Groove IO reads the artist, title and tempo off an engraved PDF by itself.

Look up song details online is ticked by default: saving then fills in the album, cover art and YouTube links. Untick it to save the song exactly as you typed it, with nothing looked up. That is the one to use for your own recording, or a test song.

Edit on a song page opens the same fields again, plus the cover image and the audio files. Import Data on that dialog pulls anything still blank from the public music databases without touching what you have already filled in. Delete removes the song and its files.

The song page

The notation fills the page and the transport sits under it. Everything else lives behind five labelled buttons in the header — the label hides on a narrow screen, the icon stays — each opening one drawer on the right; press a button again to close it, or press another to swap.

• Song details: artwork, metadata, the notation picker, setlist and edit actions.
• Audio: which recording plays, the playback engine, the drum kit for synth playback, the mixer and the links. Sources at the bottom lists every file and link the song plays from, each with Remove; removing one also drops its start time and sync points.
• Practice tools: the song sync summary, the metronome and your rating; in learn mode this is also where Loops live.
• Notes: notes pinned to bars of the chart.
• Setlist: the setlist you are playing through, so you can jump to another song in it.

Playback survives closing a drawer. Which drawer you had open is remembered on that device — except in learn mode, where the song page always opens with no drawer.

Rate my playing, beside Play, grades a play-through from the top of the song to the end with your microphone or e-kit, the same way a warm-up step is rated. On a plan with free takes, a line beside it also says how many are left this week. When the song ends a dialog shows the full verdict. With Grooves on, the dialog and the drawer also list each groove of the song with how many of its notes landed on the beat, whether you played it ahead, behind or on time, how tight your strokes were around that, and how many hits you missed or added; bars outside any groove share one last row. Timing and tightness are two different things: a groove can be on time on average and still land only half its notes inside the window, and the tightness figure is what that half is made of. Close it and the verdict stays in the Practice tools drawer, with each note on the score marked early, late or on the beat. A calibrated, trusted take is saved to your report as a take on the song’s chart.

Audio can be a file you upload (the full song, or a drumless mix, which the app prefers when both exist), a YouTube link for either, or Scroll only, which runs the chart against a plain timer at the song tempo. Once the chart has been turned into a score, Synth plays the score itself on the chosen drum kit. With a recording under it the score scrolls in time with the music and a playhead sits on the bar you are in. The metronome counts you in and can run through the take.

Loops are for the bar that keeps beating you. Drag across the bars on the notation and the loop snaps to the barlines; play it round, slow it with the speed control, wind it back up. A loop is saved with the song, so it is still there tomorrow. Notes are pinned to bars: write one against bar 12 and it stays on bar 12 at any zoom.

Song grooves

Most songs are a handful of grooves, repeated and joined by fills. When a song has a score with repeated bars, Groove IO works out which bars belong to which groove and shows them on the song page.

• Shaded bars. Each groove has its own colour, and its name is written where it starts. Bars with no shading are fills and one-offs.
• Song map. The strip above the notation is the whole song. The marker shows the bar being played, and pressing a block jumps playback to its first bar.
• Grooves, in the song page controls, switches the colours and the map off and on. It starts on, and the choice is remembered on that device.
• Song grooves… opens a dialog that lists the grooves in the breakdown and saves the ones you tick as grooves of your own, which you will find on the Grooves page under Mine. A groove you have already saved is marked In your grooves. Each saved groove is a copy of its own, so editing the song later does not change it, and it spends one of your groove allowance. With Edit grooves (Pro and above), this is also where you rename a groove, in the field beside it.

Groove IO finds grooves one, two or four bars long. Now and then it finds three, when a four-bar phrase ends in a different fill every time. Bars are matched exactly. A bar that differs by one note counts as a different bar, so a chart with many small variations shows fewer grooves than you hear.

Adjusting the grooves. When the breakdown is not what you hear, correct it. On Pro and above, Edit grooves on the song page turns on edit mode, once your grooves have loaded. On other plans the button carries a Pro badge and leads to the upgrade page. In edit mode, press a bar on the notation to select it, and shift-press another bar to select the run between them. A toolbar under the song map then offers:

• New groove makes a groove of the selected bars, up to eight, and marks it wherever else the song plays the same bars, in bars that are not already in a groove. A song holds at most 26 grooves.
• Add to opens a menu of the song’s grooves and puts the selected bars in the one you pick. Use it for a bar that was left out because it differs by a note.
• No groove takes the selected bars out of their groove.
• Detect again throws your changes away and starts over from what Groove IO finds. It asks first, and it appears only once you have adjusted something.
• Done leaves edit mode.

A groove you mark by hand can be up to eight bars long, which is longer than the ones Groove IO finds by itself.

The breakdown is kept for you and for that chart. If a teacher shares a song with you, they see their grooves and you see yours. Nothing is stored until you make your first adjustment; before that, the song page shows what Groove IO finds and updates it as the chart changes.

If the chart is edited later, your breakdown follows it. A groove keeps its name, a groove that grew gains the new bars, and any stretch whose notes changed is detected again. When that happens, the song page says “The chart changed, so some grooves were detected again.”

A song with only a PDF has no notes to read, so turn it into a score first.

Perfect this song

After a rated play-through with Grooves on, the verdict has a Perfect this song button under the by-groove table. It opens a list of the grooves you were scored in, simplest first, each with its figures from the take. A groove is marked Needs work, and ticked, when fewer than three quarters of its notes landed on the beat or when you played it 10 ms or more ahead or behind on average. Tick or untick as you like, then press the button below the list to make them.

Each drill is a groove of your own, the pattern, repeated to at least four bars so a take of it can be rated, saved the same way Song grooves… saves one. It spends one of your groove allowance, and a groove you have already saved from that song is marked In your drills and is not saved again.

The drills link on a score’s card lists them under Mine. Press a drill to open and practise it. Any groove you saved from a song is listed there, whichever button saved it.

Learn this song

On Pro and above, Learn this song on the song page, beside Song grooves…, turns the song into a course. On other plans it carries a Pro badge and leads to the upgrade page. The course is worked out from the song’s grooves as the song page shows them, so marking or renaming a groove with Edit grooves changes the course too.

The steps come in this order:

• Each groove, simplest first, at three tempos: 70%, 85% and the song’s own tempo, the one the song page plays it at. The drill repeats the groove until it is at least four bars long and has sixteen notes to score, and stops at eight bars.
• Each change from one groove to the next, with the fill between them, at 85% and full tempo. A change with more than four bars between the grooves is left out, a change the song makes twice is listed once, and there are at most eight.
• The whole song, at full tempo: press its button to go to the song page, turn Rate my playing on and play it from the top without stopping.

Each step shows its bars as notation under its line, so you can read a step before you start it; the whole song shows none, because its chart is on the song page.

A step with too few notes to score, however long its drill is, is still listed, with Too few notes to score where its tempos would be: practise it, then move on. It is not counted in the steps done and is never Next up.

Press Start on a step to make its drill and open it at the first tempo you have not reached. A drill is a groove of your own saved from the song, like the ones Perfect this song makes, and spends one of your groove allowance; once a step has its drill, it is used again. Continue opens it at the next tempo, and a finished step reads Play again. Next up at the top is the first step you have not finished.

Each tempo is ticked once a take at that speed or faster reaches In the pocket or above, the same bar a ladder rung sets. The whole song is allowed a few bpm under its tempo, because a recording drifts. Progress comes from your takes, so there is nothing to save. With Practise a song as your goal, the next step card on Home offers to carry on with the song you were last learning.

If you also have Your playing, the course is shaped by what your takes say, and a line under the song’s name, Shaped by your playing, names what shaped it. When your kick lands late, or your feet land fewer notes on the beat than your hands, each groove whose kick or hi-hat pedal plays off the beat gets a step before it with only the feet, such as Groove A, feet only, at 85% and full tempo; it makes a drill of its own, like any step. When you tend to rush or drag, every groove step starts at 60% instead of 70%, and its line says which way to lean.

If Groove IO finds no grooves in the chart, the course is the whole song on its own. Mark some with Edit grooves and the course follows.

Set up a song

A chart can only scroll in time with a recording once the app knows where the bars fall in the audio. A whole-number tempo and a start time are not enough for most real recordings: over a song a printed tempo drifts, and a live band speeds up and slows down. So you tell the app when a handful of bars you can recognise go by, and the chart follows the recording between them. It is meant to be done once per song.

When a song has audio but no tempo or no start time, a banner between the header and the notation reads “Set up this song”; press Set up. Later, find Set up again in the Practice tools drawer.

On a song with a chart, setting up opens Calibrate, which fills the whole screen. The header names the song, lets you pick which recording you are calibrating against (a full mix and a drumless one can put bar 1 in different places), and has Exit. The chart takes the rest of the screen, and the controls for each phase sit in a bar along the bottom that never scrolls away. If Scroll only or Synth was playing, calibration switches to the song’s recording, because you need music to tap along to.

1. Points. The chart is shown with numbered flags on the bars the app suggests, chosen where the drums change, because those are the bars you will recognise when you hear them. Click a bar to add or remove a point. Any point can be removed, the first and last included. In a bar that repeats, a small menu asks which time through (1st time, 2nd time). You need at least two points; until you have them the bottom bar reads “Pick at least one more bar.” Then press Start tapping.
2. Tap along. First a silent count-in: the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 grow in the middle of the screen at the song’s tempo, and the Tap button reads “Get ready…” until they finish, so a press or pad hit during the count does nothing (Stop cancels it). Then the recording plays from a couple of bars before the first point without a time. There is no playhead on purpose: the flag of the next point is highlighted, the bottom bar reads “Next: point 2 · bar 21”, and the chart glides down the page at the song’s pace, keeping the music you are hearing in the middle of the screen. Press Tap, or Space, on beat one of that bar, and the highlight moves on to the next point. Scroll the chart yourself and it stops following until your next tap. Stop goes back to Points and keeps the taps you have made. Points then offers two buttons instead of Start tapping: Continue from point 3 (or whichever point is next) picks up where you stopped, and Start over, if you lost your place, clears every tap, keeps your chosen bars and starts again from point 1, without asking first. After the last point, playback stops and Review opens.
3. Review. Every point is flagged on the chart and listed beside it (under it on a phone) with its bar and time. Play plays from a bar before the point with a click on beat one, so you can hear whether it lands. Nudge a point earlier or later by 10 or 50 ms until it does. Missed one? Start again from here on that point counts in, replays from just before it and keeps the taps before it. The bottom bar reads Synced at so many points with the measured tempo. Play through plays the song from a bar before the first point with a playhead on the chart, placed by your points, and the chart glides along with it; a point in the wrong place shows up as the line running ahead of or behind the music. Click, on by default, adds a metronome on the chart’s beats with an accent on each bar’s beat one. Nudge a point while it plays and the line and the click move straight away. The button reads Pause while it plays, and the next Play through carries on from where you paused. Change points goes back to Points, and Save stores the calibration and closes the screen; either one stops the playback.

Use my kit in the header lets you tap on your e-kit instead of the keyboard. Press it once and it listens on the pad you chose in MIDI setup, or the first one connected; the header then names the pad. During the tap run any hit on any pad counts as a tap, and a flam or a kick-and-snare together still counts once.

Exit, or Escape, closes calibration without saving. If any point has a tapped time, it asks Discard your setup? first, and so do Edit chart and switching to another recording; Keep editing takes you back.

If the recording and the chart disagree between two points, Review says so, for example “The chart looks about 16 bars short between bar 21 and bar 45”, with an Edit chart link. That usually means the chart is missing a repeat or a section the band plays. The chart still follows the recording at every point; between those two points the playhead holds or jumps rather than drifting, a rating leaves those bars unscored (and names them, with an Edit chart link), and a loop that runs into them carries the same warning. Fix the chart in the score editor. If most of the points disagree with each other, Review says so instead: check the taps, or the chart.

A song with no chart yet has no bars to tap, so setting it up is a short dialog instead:

1. Audio. Pick which recording you are setting up for.
2. Tempo. If the PDF carried a tempo it is shown, with Keep it; otherwise Tap the beat in time with the recording, or type it.
3. Confirm. Check the summary and press Save.

The Practice tools drawer shows the result afterwards: Synced at so many points, any mismatch warnings, and Set up again. A song with a chart and a recording is fixed by setting it up again. A song without a chart also has an Adjust manually disclosure for the raw tempo and start fields, because those are its only way to set a start time. Changing them by hand clears any sync points, and it asks first. If you edit the chart after syncing, the drawer says the chart changed since you synced; press Re-check points to open calibration with your old points filled in. Any point on a bar that no longer exists is dropped.

Where a song has been matched to a release, the tempo you set is shared with other drummers who have the same song, and the start time and sync points are shared with anyone using the same YouTube video, because bar 1 sits somewhere different in a live cut than in the studio one. Uploaded audio is never shared. The other side of that: a song someone else has already set up plays in time the first time you open it, and the drawer says where the numbers came from. Values you set yourself always win.

Sync points go one step further. When a recording another drummer has calibrated turns up on your song, the same YouTube video with a chart that has the same bar layout (the same bars, time signatures and repeats), their points are set up on your song automatically and a note on the song page tells you which recording they are for. In the Practice tools drawer those points are marked From another drummer; they are yours from then on, to check or redo in Set up again, and redoing them drops the mark. Your own points are never replaced: a recording you have calibrated, or given a start time of your own, is left exactly as you set it. If someone has calibrated the video but your chart’s bars differ from theirs, the page says so and you calibrate it yourself. Add a song, or import its data, whose recording someone has already calibrated and the page says their points will follow as soon as your chart is ready.

Turn a PDF into a score

A PDF is a picture of the music. It cannot say where bar 12 is, so the most a viewer can do is scroll it at roughly the right speed. Groove IO reads the engraving itself and turns it into a real score the app can follow bar by bar.

1. On the song page, open Song details and find Notation. Sheet music on your own song is converted the first time you open it, including a PDF you have just uploaded, so usually there is nothing to press. If nothing could be read from it, or you later delete the score it made, it is not converted again by itself: the song offers to convert it instead.
2. Press the convert action. The rhythm is read off the beams and stems, not guessed from the spacing. Repeat barlines come through as repeat marks, so the score keeps the chart’s bar numbers and plays each section the right number of times. One-bar and two-bar repeat signs and multi-bar rests are written out in the order you play them.
3. The score takes the PDF’s place on the page, in time with your recording. View original PDF keeps the original one click away.

A bar whose durations do not add up is flagged rather than quietly kept, and the page says how many did not balance. Fix any of them with Open in editor, which opens the score in Groove Studio. Converting again replaces the song’s score, corrections included, so convert before you correct rather than after. The same picker also lets you start an empty score attached to the song, or make one of your existing scores its notation.

This works on engraved charts, the kind exported from notation software, which is how most drum charts are set. A scan or a photograph has no engraving to read and is refused with no staves detected rather than guessed at.

Setlists and favourites

Setlists holds sets in the order you play them; add a song from its page with the setlists menu. Press Play setlist on a setlist and Groove IO takes you to its first song with the Setlist drawer open. Press Play setlist there, or pick a setlist from that drawer on any song, and it plays the songs in order on the song page, the chart following each one, with a ten-second break and a count-in between songs. Click a song in the drawer to jump to it. Free includes one setlist, Pro unlimited. The star on any song or groove puts it in Favourites.

Drum kits

A Kit select sits wherever a score plays: the score page, the Grooves page, the warm-up runner, the public share page and the song page’s Audio drawer, where it changes what Synth playback sounds like. Two kits ship, both recorded from real drums. SM Drums is a 1960s Ludwig kit and the default. Rusty is an oversized 1980s kit with a bigger, looser sound. Each is a few megabytes, fetched the first time it is needed and then kept for the session.

The choice is remembered on that device rather than on your account. Switching mid-groove carries on from where playback was, on the new sounds. While a kit is still loading, the line beside the select says Loading… and anything you play sounds on simple built-in drum sounds until the kit is ready. The count-in clicks, the metronome and practice scoring stay on the synth click whichever kit is selected: a click is a click, and scoring listens for you, not for the app.