Hi all, I’m a Yamaha FGDP-50 and HandSonic HPD-20 user and I’ve subscribed to QFG and Melodics to help me get better. I had my own take on what kind of software would help me the most and since it didn’t exist, I built it! So, here’s me advertising it to y’all, please forgive me…
It’s called Metronome Hero and it just came out today for iOS and the Mac version should be available early next week.
Plug in your finger drums and play along to the metronome and you see a visualization of your timing, whether you’re rushing ahead or laying back too far. It also judges my consistency.
I play all of the drum patterns I’m learning on QFG and I let Metronome Hero speed up whenever I play well enough and slow down when I get sloppy. It really works!
There’s a ton of features too, all detailed here in the tutorial:
You don’t import from anywhere, just play the beats from Addictive Drums. The app only cares that you’re playing in time, not what exact notes you are playing. The in-app purchase is to keep using the challenges, level up and down, Band Sync, AUv3, etc. Basically the metronome is free but the rest is a subscription. It’s not very much imho, but of course I’d say that. I hope that after 7-days free trial people will see the value and subscribe to help support my efforts. Thanks in advance if you’re one of those people!
Ok, this is a kick-ass piece of software. There are a ton of metronome apps, but this is the first one that seems to show whether or not I’m playing behind or ahead of the beat (that I’ve been able to find). I have it hooked up to my laptop and it’s playing the metronome through Ableton audio and receiving midi clicks through Ableton.
The one thing I wish I had assurance on is that the latency was correct. The latency (through whole mac/Ableton system) was estimated at 22ms using the MH calibration. Getting this right seems absolutely critical if one is going to work at nailing the pocket in such a tight way. Otherwise you’d be training the wrong thing!
Is there some way to get a ground truth, so I can be absolutely certain? I guess that’d mean creating a midi metronome track and playing it with all the pieces in place, and then seeing where it ends up on the MH iphone display (either ahead or behind)?
Oh man, I haven’t installed the app yet, but huge thanks in advance at least for the brilliant idea! It sounds very, very promising! You’ve packed a lot of features into the first version—AUv3 alone is a big deal! At first glance, I didn’t see an option to play in a triplet grid, though I might have missed it. I’m off to install the app now and will leave a full review later!
Oh man thanks for the kind words David! It really means a lot. This has been a labor of love for me, and it’s helped me so much that it makes me happy to get it on other people’s hands. And your observation about latency is really perceptive of you. If you play midi through the system, it can look like it’s ahead of the beat because the machine itself doesn’t have to listen for the audible beat coming from the speaker! Sometimes I manually push the calibration outside of the automatic calibration range too, just feeling like I need to lay off the pocket a little more than it wants me to if that makes sense. I think the good news is that no matter what you’re training yourself to be sensitive to such things, which I think is a win when you end up playing with others or even just one your own. One sort of ground truth you can apply is to set your FGDP–50 (or equivalent) to repeat at a certain tempo, and listen to how that feels against the beat, adjusting the calibration while the repeating note is playing. I should definitely make a video about this very topic!
For triplets you can set the tempo to 6/8, 9/8, 12/8, or 15/8. On those meters the base becomes three. I think I’ve done that correctly. It is something I’m willing to work on if it doesn’t suffice because I too love triplet grooves. I’m currently beefing up swing as well to allow even more flexibility.
Speaking of using an external metronome, when I played 100 bpm on Google’s metronome (literally metronome in the search engines pops up to a google page), there’s a drift with your metronome over time. So one of them is slightly off, likely (putting on my SWE hat) due to something like a discretization issue or a # of samples in a buffer in a particular amount of time. I also noticed a slow drift between the MH metronome and Addictive Drums 2 midi riffs for ostensibly the same tempos.
I think the web audio metronome is the one more likely to be drifting, but this is bound to happen across devices, which is why Ableton invented Link. It makes sure to keep things in sync.
David, I was thinking about this last night. I think what you should dois to turn on consistency mode and leave accuracy note off for now. Then play a very simple hi-hat 16th note beat. See how your accuracy looks when you don’t focus on it. Adjust the latency a little bit if you feel like it, and then once you feel like you’re doing a simple groove like that and you’ve got everything dialed in, then you can go and be confident that more complex grooves will be scored appropriately.
I’ll say one thing, I’m learning things about my playing even from one or two days from this app. Primarily, it’s forcing me to focus on the exact sounding of the metronome in a way I never really did before.
I think the latency calculation is probably working, insofar as when I really, really, REALLY focus, I often end up more in the green zone (pocket) than anywhere else. I’m using hedge language only because I don’t have a means of ground truth.
A couple of questions/observations (all given with respect and attempt to improve what you’ve made):
The Resume button turning on the metronome is unexpected behavior, in my opinion. Instead, there should just be a Cancel button, perhaps, which returns to the metronome screen without starting up. (This is a constant annoyance for me).
The screen goes dark after some amount of time. To keep the screen bright, is that something I need to change in my iPhone settings? If not, can you make it a parameter (e.g. keep the screen bright all the time).
The way the level up works currently seems (no disrespect) potentially harmful to timing. After a single measure (or two?) the speed jumps up. Isn’t that simply going to train people to speed up constantly instead of set the tempo? My opinion is that the change is too quick, and I think if it changed speed after e.g. 10 or 20 (or a parameter’s value worth of) measures, this would work significantly better. Perhaps I’m missing something and this is already configurable?
What happens when two midi notes are struck at once (as happens all the time when playing a complex rhythm)? I’d love to understand how simultaneous strikes are scored (I assume first hit, and then a time-out for a few milliseconds).
One thing that would be super cool is if you have a window of time in which hits are considered to be simultaneous, would be to measure the distribution around that. It could be quite informative that these hits aren’t quite as “together” as one really thought.
I’ve observed that when my strikes are early, they continue to be early, and when they are late, they continue to be late. Is that me or is there some kind of temporal averaging going on?
With midi input, why not present the y-axis in milliseconds? I’m not sure if the y-axis is a log scale or some other nonlinear scaling, but it’d still be great to see misses in absolute time.
Thanks so much for the introductory line about the app in your post — that is exactly what I’m hoping people will experience.
The Resume button is currently designed to restart the click. To return without restarting, you can tap outside the popover and it will dismiss without starting playback again. That said, I understand why the current behavior feels unexpected, so I’m going to take another look at that flow.
I haven’t personally run into the screen dimming issue, but on my iPad the auto-lock is set to 15 minutes. It may be worth experimenting with the iPad’s Control Center / display settings to see whether that is what’s happening in your case. I’m also considering whether this should be something the app can control more directly.
That’s a really good point. Earlier versions had a lot more configuration options, and I simplified things because it was starting to feel overwhelming. What I’m now thinking is that a slider or stepper for number of measures before checking for level-up might be a nice middle ground.
For two notes struck at nearly the same time, I currently give the player the benefit of the doubt and average their timing. Earlier on I had it use the first note only — partly because I’m very cautious about rushing — but averaging ultimately felt fairer for real musical playing.
There isn’t any temporal averaging going on in the timing analysis itself. In my own playing, I notice that when I rush, I tend to keep rushing, whereas laying back feels more natural and stable. I suspect this varies quite a bit from player to player.
I intentionally stayed away from showing milliseconds because I didn’t want this to become overly technical or pull focus away from the musical feel. I love numbers too, so I absolutely understand the appeal, but my instinct has been to keep the emphasis on groove and feel rather than precise numeric readouts.
That said, your feedback has me thinking there may be room for an advanced panel on the challenge screen — closed by default so it stays simple for most users, but available for those who want deeper control and more analysis.
I’d genuinely love your thoughts on that direction.
People really need to check this app out! I’m serious!
I’m unaware of any tool (metronome or other) that has has so quickly and effectively helped me with my timing, and especially my micro timing (been using it for 10 days). Most importantly I have the idea that with dedicated effort over a longer period of time, I can make my timing as good as my inherent talents will allow. Combining this app with shift-clicking, silent measures, and the next-level beats section of Quest for Groove is just going to turn people into timing beasts.
The reason the tool is so effective is that it’s measuring something you didn’t previously have a measure on (delay or rush on the beat, and consistency). As they say, if it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed.
For $19.99, this app is a no-brainer (and no, Aure didn’t put me up to this. Just telling it as I see it).
More features are already on the way… version 1.0.4 will display the session time in the status bar, and if you tap it, you’ll be able to bring up a timer that can automatically stop the session after your preferred practice time has elapsed.
This was actually a user request from someone who said they lost track of time while using the metronome and ended up playing longer than intended, which I thought was a pretty great problem to have.
A quick update inspired in part by David’s insightful post above:
Version 1.0.4 is now includes not only the practice timer, but also Shift Click!
This is actually one of the areas where Metronome Hero’s UI is especially well suited for rhythm training.
With a traditional metronome, once the click shifts off the downbeat, it can be difficult to keep a clear sense of where the 1, 2, 3, and 4 still live.
With Metronome Hero, the click can shift to the e, and, or a, while the visual display still clearly shows the primary beats and subdivisions.
The contrast of hearing the shifted click while still seeing the downbeats makes it much easier to understand what shift-clicking is actually doing and to internalize the pulse.
It could be a really clear way to teach and visualize the shift-click concept itself.
For anyone looking for it, Shift Click will be under the Challenge menu in the Muting section.
Just telling it as I see it).