Tap the rhythm

Each round draws a rhythm on a single line, plays a count-in of four clicks, then plays the pattern. Your job is to tap along with every note as it sounds — not to tap it back afterwards, and not to tap the beat underneath it.

The rhythm is drawn on one line and not on a five-line staff, and that is on purpose: rhythm has no pitch, so there is no height to read. A filled head is a quarter note, one beat. A hollow head is a half note, two beats. Two filled heads joined at the top by a thick beam are a pair of eighth notes, half a beat each, and the beam tells you they share one beat. The squiggle with no stem is a quarter rest: one beat you count and do not play.

Before the first round: the warm-up

The very first time you play this on a device, you get a warm-up: eight steady clicks with nothing to read. Tap along with them. It takes a few seconds and it is not a formality — it is how the site measures your particular phone, browser and headphones.

This is the one exercise here that measures your equipment as well as you. A tap takes time to reach the page and a click takes time to leave the speaker, and both delays land inside the number you get scored on. Wired output costs a few thousandths of a second and is harmless. A Bluetooth headset routinely adds more than a tenth of a second — more than twice the width of the window that counts as being on the beat — and that lag is the radio link, not your playing. The warm-up exists to measure it so it can be subtracted from every round that follows. If your taps come back too scattered to measure at all, the exercise tells you so and runs the rounds without a score rather than inventing one. So before you conclude anything about your own timing from a result that feels unfair, check what you are listening on: the built-in speaker or wired headphones are the shortest path from the click to your ear.

The measurement is stored for the device, so the warm-up runs once and not before every session. You can clear it and take it again from the preferences page whenever your setup changes.

The five drills

They get harder in one direction at a time, so a bad round has one likely cause.

Just the beat is quarter notes and nothing else, two bars of them. There is no reading to do at all, which is the point: it isolates whether you can hold a steady pulse, and it is worth returning to whenever a later drill falls apart.

Quarters and halves adds the two-beat note. The trap is that a half note is where people speed up — nothing happens for a whole beat, so they arrive early on the next one. Keep counting through it.

Counting the silence adds the quarter rest. Rests are where bars go missing. A beat of silence is a beat you count exactly as carefully as one you play, and the way to prove you did is that the note after it lands where it should.

Eighth notes halves the beat. Two even taps inside one beat, every pair drawn beamed so you can see which beat they belong to. Even is the whole requirement; the usual error is a long-short pair that leans, not a pair that is late.

Everything, a little faster mixes all of it and moves the tempo from 80 to 100 beats per minute. It is a small step deliberately: the aim is a tempo that asks more of you, not one that asks more of your hardware.

Reading the feedback

The score is a percentage, and it is the less useful half of what you get back.

The half that teaches is the direction. Tapping consistently a little early is rushing; consistently a little late is dragging; neither is the same problem as landing on both sides at random. Someone who rushes by a steady amount is much closer to playing in time than someone scattered by the same amount, because a steady bias is one adjustment and scatter is a skill. Read the direction first, correct that, and let the number follow.

If any of the notation above is unfamiliar, the rhythm basics lesson covers the pulse, the bar, the three note values and what the count-in is doing, and ends with a gentler round of the same exercise.