How Rytme works.

01Getting started

Rytme is a trainer for rhythm reading and timing: you read a notated bar, tap it in time on a pad — and see with millisecond precision where you hit and where you drift. The app runs in landscape and completely offline.

On the very first launch, two cards greet you:

• Welcome — the idea in two sentences: read rhythm, tap in time, get honest feedback. Eight chapters build on each other; there is no streak pressure, you repeat as often as you like.
• Calibrate once? — an offer to measure your device offset (typically 40–50 ms) so it doesn't show up as your own tendency. The measurement takes about half a minute. Later is perfectly fine: practicing works right away without calibration, and you can do it any time in the settings (section 08).

02The home screen

The four buttons at the top lead to Your Path, Competition, Search and Settings. Below, the home screen shows where you stand:

Your level (Bronze to Diamond)

The YOUR LEVEL card shows your player level with a progress bar toward the next one. The tiers — Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond — depend only on which exercises you have passed; the exact rules are under Passing & levels. Tapping the card opens the in-app explanation.

The diligence mirror

At the bottom of the level card you find Practice time, Practice days and Today — a calm look back at your practice. Only time with the practice loop actually running is counted. There is deliberately no daily goal and no streak that can break.

Your consistency

The YOUR CONSISTENCY card shows, as a number and a curve, how tightly your taps scatter around the grid — per practice day, across the last 30 practice days, lower is better. Consistency is independent of any systematic early/late (your tendency), which makes it the most honest measure of your sense of rhythm. The curve appears once you have practiced on at least two days.

Continue practicing

The big card on the right jumps straight into the next open key exercise — with chapter, time signature, target tempo and a notation preview. One tap and you're in the player.

03Your Path

Your Path is the map of the app: 8 chapters from a steady pulse to two-pad sticking, 138 exercises in total. Each chapter row shows name, concept, a mini-notation sample and two counters: Keys x / y and Total x / y.

Key exercises and free practice

In every chapter, a small curated subset is marked as a key exercise (key symbol next to the title). Only these count toward unlocking: pass all key exercises of a chapter at least at Beginner level, and the next chapter opens. All other exercises are free practice — they block nothing, but they do count toward your level.

• Within an unlocked chapter you choose freely; nothing has to be played in order.
• Locked chapters stay visible (dimmed with a lock); a tap explains what opens them.
• A green check mark means: all key exercises of the chapter are passed.

The eight chapters

In the chapter view, each exercise row shows position, title (with a key symbol for key exercises), time signature and target tempo, the notation preview, the status — a green check plus the accuracy level you reached once passed — and the favorite heart. There are deliberately no stars.

04The practice player

The player is the core of the app. Every exercise is exactly one bar running as a loop — notation with beat numbers on top, tap area and control bar at the bottom.

Listen and Practice

• ♪ Listen plays the notated rhythm as a click loop — with a moving marker, no scoring. Use it to check that you've read the notation correctly.
• ▶ Practice starts the practice loop: you tap the notated notes in time on the tap area. Optionally, one bar of Count-in leads you in (settings).

The tap area

The big pill below the notation is your drum. Where you tap doesn't matter — only when. The arrows ‹ › next to it switch to the previous/next exercise of the chapter.

In chapter 8, two tap areas labeled L and R appear automatically: the notation prescribes the hand (alternating strokes/sticking). A hit with the wrong hand gets its own marker — and makes the loop unclean.

Accuracy — three tiers

You pick the tier any time via the Accuracy chip. The windows are fixed millisecond values, independent of tempo. Switching tiers resets the current streak. For each exercise, Rytme remembers the highest tier you have passed.

Counting, tempo, streak

• Counting switches the accompanying click between Main beats (the pulse) and Subdivisions (the finer grid).
• Tempo ranges from about half the target tempo (at least 40 BPM) up to the target. Passing only counts at target tempo — slower is explicitly allowed and is then called Practice tempo (amber): full feedback, no scoring.
• Streak is the three circles: each filled circle is one clean loop in a row, three in a row = passed (details). An unclean loop empties the circles — the loop simply keeps running, attempts are unlimited.

The feedback

• Tendency balance (above the notation): shows live whether you average early ◀ / ▶ late — with a verdict like ✓ on beat or 12 ms too early.
• Per-note markers: every note head takes the color of your tap — blue = too early, green = inside the window, red = too late, orange = wrong hand (chapter 8), gray = missed.
• Quick diagnosis: sums up your consistency ("very steady" below ±20 ms, "fairly steady" below ±35 ms, otherwise "still shaky") and names the most conspicuous note — e.g. "Watch note 3 — it lands later than the rest."
• Per-note offset (optional): shows the ms deviation of your last tap below the note — only for early/late, or for all notes (settings).

05Reading notation

Rytme shows real music notation (engraved with a professional notation font), reduced to what matters for rhythm reading: one line, one bar, clear beam groups.

The learning scaffold

Below the bar sit beat numbers (1 2 3 4 …), and thin guide lines mark the beats. This learning scaffold can be switched off in the settings once you want to read "bare".

What you will meet

• Note values from whole notes down to sixteenths, grouped with beams and double beams.
• Rests (quarter and eighth rests from chapter 3).
• Dotting and ties (chapter 5) — a tie binds two notes into one sound: only the first head is tapped.
• Triplets (chapter 6) — three even notes in the space of two, marked with a bracket and the digit 3.
• Time signatures 4/4, 3/4, 5/4, 5/8, 6/8 and 7/8 (chapter 7) — in 7/8 the beam grouping shows how to count (e.g. 2+2+3).
• Sticking (chapter 8) — R/L denotes the hand; accents ask for an emphasized stroke.

You see the notation of every exercise in the list and in the player — and ♪ Listen lets you hear it any time before you practice for scoring.

06Passing & levels

What is a clean loop?

A loop (one pass through the bar) counts as clean when all three conditions hold:

1. At least 85 % of the notes land inside the window of your chosen accuracy tier,
2. you stay within the stray-tap budget: at most 15 % extra taps — for short exercises (up to 6 notes) the budget is zero, any extra tap disqualifies,
3. for two-pad exercises the sticking is correct (no wrong hand).

An exercise is passed after 3 clean loops in a row — at target tempo, in the chosen tier. The player then permanently shows ✓ passed · tier. For each exercise, the highest tier ever passed counts; mastery means: passed at Perfectionist (±25 ms).

The scoring windows

The windows are fixed ms values — independent of tempo. In fast exercises the notes move closer together, so the same window becomes musically stricter. Scoring always uses the calibrated deviation: the measured device offset is already subtracted (Calibration).

The player levels

"Passed" here means: at least at Beginner. A level, once reached, is permanent — it is never downgraded, even when new exercises join the catalog later; new exercises then simply count toward the next level.

Tendency and consistency

Rytme distinguishes two things that feel very different while practicing:

• Tendency — you are systematically early or late. That is fixable: often it's device latency (calibrate!), the rest is habit.
• Consistency — how tightly your taps scatter. That is the actual sense of rhythm and improves only through practice. This is exactly what the curve on the home screen records — per practice day, so you can see real progress.

07Competition

Competition is the acid test: pass 5 randomly drawn exercises in a row — at full scoring (3 clean loops in a row per exercise) and at target tempo. It opens once you have reached chapter 3.

The rules

• Exercises are drawn from your unlocked chapters, starting at chapter 2 (chapter 1 is excluded), five distinct exercises. Before starting you can Redraw.
• During a run there is no preview, no tempo throttling and no skipping — just you and the notation.
• The accuracy tier is the tap accuracy you last chose, and it stays fixed for the whole run.

Difficulty

Easy, Medium and Hard control which chapters the draw favors — easy favors lower ones, hard favors higher ones, medium spreads widely around the middle of your reached chapters. It is a preference, not an exclusion — and it does not change how strictly you are scored.

History and best results

Every finished run lands in the History (local, the last 50): with date, difficulty, tier and total time — and per exercise, reported separately: understanding (from the notation appearing to your first practice start) and playing (until passed), plus tendency, consistency, loop count and the most conspicuous note. The best result is kept per difficulty: highest tier, ties broken by shortest time. Everything stays on your device — there is no online ranking.

08Calibration

Why calibrate?

Every device outputs the click with a delay and reports your tap with a delay — together typically 40–50 ms. Without compensation it would look like you tap systematically off. This constant offset can be measured once and is then subtracted from every score. (What cannot be subtracted is fluctuation — which is why you should use the speaker rather than Bluetooth.)

Calibration is optional: without a measurement, Rytme assumes an offset of 0. For the Beginner window (±80 ms) that works fine; at Perfectionist level the measurement really pays off.

The main method: off-beat tapping

1. Settings → Calibration → Off-beat tap.
2. The app asks once for microphone permission — the microphone only listens to the device's own speaker click and your tap.
3. A metronome clicks (default 80 BPM), a silent bar guide shows the midpoint between two clicks — the "and".
4. Tap exactly on that "and", about 8–12 times, firmly and evenly. Then your offset is set: Calibrated: X ms.

If a measurement fails (too shaky, too few clean taps), nothing is saved — an existing calibration is kept. Just repeat: tap more firmly and more precisely on the "and".

Alternatives

• Play back the rhythm — three short listen-and-repeat exercises instead of off-beat tapping.
• Set manually — enter the offset by hand, e.g. for Bluetooth, where the microphone measurement cannot work.

09Search & favorites

The Search magnifier opens the exercise browser: free text across name and concept, plus filters by chapter, time signature, status (passed / open / locked) and favorites. Each result row names the chapter it comes from, the tier you reached and the target tempo.

The heart ♥ lives in the player and on every exercise row: use it to mark exercises you want to revisit regularly, and filter them in the browser with one tap.

10Settings

Playing

• Count-in — one bar counted in before each exercise.
• Learning Scaffold — beat numbers and guide lines in the notation.
• Tendency Display — balance, per-note markers and quick diagnosis while practicing.
• Per-Note Offset — ms deviation of the last tap below the note: Off / Early-late only / All notes.

Calibration

Calibration status plus the three methods Off-beat tap, Play back the rhythm and Set manually — details under Calibration.

Language

System / Deutsch / English — takes effect immediately, no restart.

Diagnostics / developer

Three labs (Notation Lab, Timing Lab, Loopback Lab) for measuring and inspecting engraving and device timing. They are not part of the training — but curious looks do no harm.

11Data & privacy

• Rytme has no internet permission — the app technically cannot send anything. Progress, favorites, history and calibration live exclusively on your device.
• No account, no tracking, no ads, no in-app purchases.
• The only optional permission is the microphone — solely for loopback calibration; the signal is processed transiently on-device and never stored.
• If you uninstall the app, the local data is gone — there is no cloud backup.

You'll find the formal privacy policy at rytme.net/datenschutz (German).

12FAQ

The app says "too late", but I feel right on the beat.

Very likely device latency: click output and touch reporting together typically cost 40–50 ms. Calibrate once — afterwards the tendency balance shows your real timing.

Why doesn't my streak fill up?

Four common reasons: you are below 85 % hits in the chosen tier; you have too many extra taps (in short exercises a single one disqualifies); you practice below target tempo (amber Practice tempo — feedback yes, scoring no); or you switched the accuracy tier mid-run — that resets the streak.

Can I practice with Bluetooth headphones?

For serious practice: no. Wireless audio delays the click — and it fluctuates, so it cannot be subtracted. The player warns you. Use the speaker or wired headphones; for wireless the best you can do is Set manually.

Do I lose progress or my level when I take a break?

No. There are no streaks, no expiring goals, and a level once reached is never downgraded. The diligence mirror only looks back, it never threatens.

What does the "± N ms" number on the home screen mean?

Your consistency: how tightly your taps scattered around the grid on that practice day. Lower is better — and the trend across days is your most honest measure of progress.

I accidentally double-tapped — is everything ruined?

Lightning-fast double-taps (below ~60 ms) are filtered out as bounce. A real extra tap counts against the stray-tap budget — longer exercises forgive a slip.

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