Customize Grid ×

Add Instrument

Tap to add the instrument as a row at the top of the grid. Tap again to remove. The default 8 rows always stay visible.

Swap Voice ×

Pick a sound for this limb. Cells you've already authored stay — only the voice changes.

Spot Rules ×

Tap a spot to cycle it: free → skip → must play → free. Runs and gaps count in the spots you leave free, so a run of 2 means the next two available spots.

System Library ×

Tap a system to load it. Save the current grid as a named system using the button below.

Bars ×

Loop repeats this many bars. Run keeps streaming new bars and always shows two.

Limbs ? ×

Right hand plays every 1 and &; left hand plays every e and a (written below the line). Reading Lab only. Below Level 7 both hands play every note together.

1 limb · 2 limbs · 3 limbs · 4 limbs (R / L / K / Q). Voices, pitches, and palettes are in the Sounds menu.

Display ×

Standard music notation with note heads, stems and beams.

Compact gives each limb its own track. Drum staff is the standard five-line percussion staff, with a key on the first bar. It switches on by itself when a system is active.

Lit bar keeps the bar being played white and shades the rest. Fade is the older crossfade between bars.

Sizes notation to fill the available staff height. Turn it OFF — or just drag the size slider below — to set the size yourself.

Drag to set the size yourself — this switches off Auto-fit so your size sticks (handy when a System fills a bar and auto-fit overshoots). Flip Auto-fit back on to let the app size it again.

Soft column highlight that follows the current beat in the 2‑bar view. In the Reading Lab it's a practice aid: leave it on as long as it helps, but a Tap Play run with the guide bar on won't pass a level — it shows you where the beat is, so it reads the music for you. Switch it off to earn the level.

Overlays a thin vertical line at ~1/4 from the left in scroll mode, marking the moment each note sounds.

Streamlines the reading experience by removing bar lines, repeat marks, and the time signature so the staff reads as one continuous stream — useful in Linear mode for seeing how runs (doubles, triples, quads, 7-strokes etc.) flow across what would normally be a barline. Note: with bar lines hidden, the time signature display is also disabled.

Shows dashed lines at each beat subdivision — in Staff mode as tick marks on the staff lines, in 3D as perspective grid lines, in Dots mode as lines between note groups.

When on, the same bar(s) repeat continuously. When off, Run regenerates a fresh pattern at every cycle.

Add-ons ? ×

Tag random onsets with one of four notation marks. Each add-on has its own mode (per-bar across all limbs, or per-limb counts).

🥁 Beats ×

Load a beat into the drum machine, then switch Drum machine on to play it under the Reading lab. Band marks the beat students play with by default. The grid you are editing is saved by itself; these are named copies.

Calibrate the guide bar ×

Two short rounds of eight taps. Tap the box, press the space bar, or hit your pad (with MIDI on). Round 1: tap along with the clicks. Round 2: tap when the bar reaches the line. Your reaction time cancels out; what is left is the real delay between picture and sound.

🔁 Echo Reader ×

The same bar twice, written two ways. One measure shows only your ⚡ limb — just your notes, nothing else on the page. The other is the exact same music written with the rest of the kit around it, the way it would appear in a real chart. You play the phrase twice in a row; what changes is how much you have to read.

It sounds identical both times — the whole system plays through both measures. Only the notation changes.

⚡ Super Reader ×

Rotates the staff view bar-by-bar so you drill the same figure across multiple readings. Requires a system to be active + staff display mode.

Set any field to 0 to skip that view. ⚡-only hides the fixed system rows and shows just the lab-generated notes so you play the free voice from memory. Look-ahead is truthful — the next bar you see is the next bar you'll play.

Time ×

Top number = beats per measure. Bottom = the beat unit (4 = quarter, 8 = eighth, 16 = sixteenth). Shown at the start of every passage.

Pick one or more. Tap to add or remove. One active = single subdivision. Two or more = Mix (random pick each beat).

The smallest cell of each beat — controls how finely each beat is divided.

0 = straight · 100 = full triplet feel. Pushes the off-beat 8th later. Toggle off to mute swing without losing the slider value.

How much of each bar is rest. The notes you get keep their full beat — Space silences whole beats rather than poking holes in them. 25% rests one beat out of four, 50% rests two, and 100% rests every beat, so you can play along to the click with nothing written. Which beats rest changes each bar; how many does not.

e's & ah's figures ×

A 16ths reading set built from the off-beat partials. Each beat the shuffle draws one figure below. The ah → e couple guarantees an ah is answered by an e on the next beat — the downbeat between them stays silent (…ah · e…) — letting you weave denser syncopated clusters. Turn figures off for a narrower reading focus.

At least one figure stays on.

Click displacement ? ×

Choose where the click fires inside each beat. Practice notes against an offset click to strengthen internal time.

Syncopation ×

Single-line reading patterns built from quarters, 8ths, dotted quarters, rests, and ties. The drummer interprets each line in any voice.

Adds offbeat-anchored quarter patterns. Each quarter straddles a beat-line (anchors on "&" of 1, 2, 3) for the classic syncopated feel.

1's & 2's ×

When ON, the generator never produces three or more consecutive 16th notes — neither within a beat nor across a beat boundary. The pool is restricted to single 16ths, paired 16ths (doubles), and 16th + dotted-8th combinations. Useful for drilling clean isolated accents and broken-pair phrasings.

Slide left to feature isolated single‑16th hits more often (e‑rest, a‑rest patterns). Slide right to feature paired doubles more often (1‑e, e‑&, &‑a). Mid = even mix.

Cycles ×

A cycle is a short phrase that repeats on its own length instead of lining up with the bar — so it keeps landing in a new spot until it works its way back around. Playing against one trains the thing a metronome can't: holding your own place while something familiar refuses to sit still. You can read a cycle, hear one, or run both at once.

Written and Sound are separate loops and can run at the same time — read one cycle while hearing another.

Dot 8th ×

A hit every 3rd 16th, repeating without ever restarting on the beat — so it keeps moving through the bar and only lines up again every three beats. It's the sound of a dotted-8th pulse laid over 4/4, and one of the most common ways a groove pushes against its own time.

Dotted 8th — one hit every 3rd 16th (N · ·). Classic dotted-eighth pulse.
2 of 3 — two hits then a rest (N N ·). Denser, more driving feel.
Mix — randomly swaps between the two each 3-cell cycle.

Groups ×

Reading practice for runs of notes rather than single figures. Pick the run lengths you want; they're placed freely across beats and bar lines, so a run of 3 turns up on the downbeat, starting on "e", straddling the barline — every position it can occupy. That's what builds the reflex to see a cluster as one shape instead of counting it note by note.

Tap sizes to include them. Each cluster placed gets its size picked randomly from your selection. Sizes shown depend on the current subdivision (16ths cap at 8, sextuplets cap at 8).

Limb Networking ×

A 5-unit course in reading with one limb while the others hold a pattern. It introduces every single-note figure first, then two-note, then three-note, then longer runs — that order is deliberate, since each one asks something different of the bass drum foot. Tap a unit to jump to its start, or pick any lesson from the list.

Shapes the stream into 4-bar phrases instead of endless even randomness: a bar states an idea, the next echoes most of it, the third goes somewhere else, the fourth gets busier before it resets. Every figure the lesson teaches still appears — and when a repeat would break the lesson's own rules, the generator picks something else instead, which is where the surprises come from. Turn it off for flat, fully random practice.

Guide ×

Reading settings×

Figures = picks rhythms from the current subdivision's pool. Synco = single-line reading in the tradition of Ted Reed's Progressive Steps to Syncopation, with quarters / 8ths / ties / rests.

Tap to pick a subdivision. Multi-subdivision Mix lives in the global Time menu.

Settings ×

The moving column that tracks the beat across the bar. In the Reading Lab it appears on its own for early levels and steps aside after level 10 — switching it here takes over from that.

Tempo, accelerando and metronome modes live on the Metronome tab. Limbs, time signature, accents, format and quick sounds live in the lab toolbar above the staff.