Actual RhythmsFor music teachers
Rhythm reading from the repertoire your students will play.
Hand students rhythms that real composers wrote, from Bach chorales to Joplin to Latin clave, at the level they're ready for. They tap, and they see exactly where each tap landed. You get a lesson's worth of context with every excerpt.
Free and non-commercial. No accounts, no student data, nothing to install.
Built for the way you teach rhythm
Set the level, the meter and the music.
- Five levels. 1: whole, half and quarter notes on the beat. 2: eighths and the basic 6/8 flow. 3: dotted quarters, ties, syncopation. 4: sixteenths and dotted-eighth figures. 5: triplets, 32nds and sixteenth syncopation.
- Every common meter. 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 and 6/8 up front; 2/2, 3/8, 9/8, 12/8, 3/2 and 6/4 when you want them.
- Choose the repertoire. Folk tunes, Bach chorales, classical, ragtime, jazz solos, pop songs and Latin patterns, alone or together.
- Two or four bars, each read twice through after a count-in. One-bar Latin patterns go around four times.
- Feedback per tap. A lane for each pass shows a tick for every note and a dot for every tap, colored by timing. Easy, Normal and Pro accuracy settings.
- Hear it first. Listen plays the passage's own line on piano (or bass, guitar or drums for those parts), at your tempo or, for about a third of rhythms, the original tempo.
- Any device. Phones, tablets, laptops and a projector. Tap on screen or with Space, F or J. Bluetooth speakers and headphones get their own calibration.
- Browse all 81,350. Search the corpus by title, composer, country or year and pick a specific rhythm to teach.
Ideas for class
One rhythm, many pieces.
Every excerpt links to every other piece in the corpus with the same rhythm, including pieces that write it in another meter with the same proportions. See nineteen surprising matches.
Same figure, three centuries
Take a dotted-eighth figure from a Scottish march and show the 206 pieces that use it, written six ways, from 2/4 to 2/2. A quick lesson in why notation is a choice.
Warm-ups with a story
Open each rehearsal with three rhythms at the ensemble's level. Before you play the melody, ask who wrote it, where and when. The answer is always on the card.
A unit on clave
Son clave, rumba clave, cáscara, tresillo, habanera, the 6/8 bell and bossa nova, written out the conventional way and linked to the folk tunes and solos that share their rhythms.
Put a real rhythm on the board tomorrow.
Open the app on the classroom screen and tap along together.