Labs
Five small labs. Tap along to a rhythm and see how early or late you were, learn a rhythm by hearing it, tapping it and then clapping it back into the microphone, test whether you can name a rhythm by ear, move the swing from straight to hard, and build your own on the circle.
From theory: Western theory: note values
Tap along
Pick a rhythm and press play on its grid. Then tap the hits with the button or the space bar. Each hit you tap gets a dot: how early or late you were against the sound.
Tapping a little early, around 20 to 50 ms, is normal when keeping time with a click (researchers call it negative mean asynchrony). Drummers tend to sit nearer 0. What matters most is a low spread, not a perfect average.
Clap it back
Learn a rhythm in three steps, then be scored on it. Hear it plays the rhythm so you know what you are aiming at. Tap along keeps it playing while you tap with the space bar or the pad, and shows which hit is early or late. Take goes quiet and listens through the microphone: four clicks, then you clap the rhythm from memory.
Press play on the grid and listen to it go round a few times. The numbers along the top are the count; a lit dot is a hit. Say the count aloud with it, saying the rests as well as the hits. When you can say it without the sound, move on.
Start the rhythm, then tap the hits: press the space bar, or tap the pad. Each tap is matched to the nearest hit and shows how early or late it was. Slow it down with the BPM in the bar below if you keep missing.
Press Play along, then tap the hits.
The rhythm is not played during a take, because the speaker would be heard by the microphone and scored as perfect. Turn the microphone on, press Start a take, and you hear four clicks. Then clap the rhythm for the number of laps you chose. Nothing is recorded or sent anywhere: the page only notes when each clap happened.
The microphone is off.
Clap with a short, sharp sound and keep the room quiet. A phone microphone adds a few tens of milliseconds of delay, which the page measures and removes before it works out your spread, so judge yourself by the spread and by the hits answered, not by how late the claps sit.
Name that rhythm
A rhythm plays with no label. Pick its name. Start with the early levels and widen the pool as you go.
Swing ratio
Swing is when the first of each pair of eighth notes is longer than the second. Press a button from 1:1 (straight, both equal) to 3:1 (hard) while the groove plays. The grid's columns resize to match, and the bar shows how much of the beat each note takes. The lesson, Swing and feel, explains where each setting is used.
Circle lab
Spread k hits over n steps as evenly as possible, then rotate. A surprising number of named rhythms are one of these circles, started in a different place.