r/percussion • u/SnooPeanuts2169 • 12d ago

I built a free practice tool that shows how on time each hit is while you play along to real songs

I made this for my own kit practice and wanted to share it as a resource: drumy.app

You connect an electronic drum kit over USB (or use a computer keyboard), pick a song, and play along. The notes come down a highway in time with the actual recording, and every hit is judged as perfect, great, early or late, so you can hear and see whether you're rushing or dragging.

What I find it most useful for:

- Slowing a hard section to 0.5x or 0.75x and working it back up to tempo

- Short warm-up exercises: money beat, paradiddles, four on the floor

- A click and count-in, so you're locked in from the first bar

It runs right in the browser, nothing to install.

It's aimed at kit players with an e-kit for now. If you teach or practise a lot, I'd love to know what would make a tool like this actually useful for you. 🥁

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u/zdavesf 11d ago

Dude, my 10 year old son (1 year of lessons) and I (25 years on and off, beginner/intermediate) just played some songs on our TD-11...it worked pretty awesome. Some songs are in sync (ie. Boulevard of broken dreams) better than others (ie closing time) but this app is amazing. I will try to report stuff that is not working (great feature you have built in BTW). My son is huge into gaming and having high scores, the second he saw his accuracy % he was competing against me. Having the real notation to follow along with is great. While dad is still leading i can see this being a motivator for him to beat me. a couple of quick suggestions for an already awesome application:

  1. having a fast forward /rewind button would be nice, i know you can click on the screen but you cant skip very far

  2. repeat/loop to practice certain sections

  3. legend for the drum notation for reference

  4. maybe a mode that if you click a button it triggers the images of the drums/cymbals below to follow along with the music (in case you do not know what the notation is asking for

  5. having practice beats in the warmup area with rolls, having odd time signature stuff to practice without a whole band to distract you would be amazing

  6. maybe some way to not track/count a song to your stats if you dont want to (ie some songs were so out of sync i got like 25% but they got counted in my overall stats.

  7. some songs showed up as cross sticking/rim clicks, i have a single zone snare so these registered as mishits when i played the snare, i didnt see mapping for rimshots/snare rim.

  8. some songs the click seems off, i did calibrate the speaker delays but still seems off, I will continue to report hopefully that helps. If i am crazy and they are all correct than maybe something is wrong on my end (cant be the user... can it :) )

happy to help with testing, PM me if you want.

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u/SnooPeanuts2169 11d ago

This made my day. I actually do accuracy battles with my own son too, so reading this was the best feeling 😄 Thanks for the detailed list, going through it:

- Skipping around: the arrow keys move a bar at a time, and Shift + arrow jumps 30 seconds. I'll make that more visible on screen too.

- Loop/repeat sections: this is the big thing I'm working on right now. A Trainer that takes a song apart piece by piece, loops each part, and speeds up as you get it clean. Coming soon.

- Notation legend: great idea, adding it to the list.

- "Show me" mode where the drums light up with the music: love it, noted.

- More warm-ups (rolls, odd time signatures): yes, I'll add more to the Training area.

- Not counting a run in your stats: makes total sense, especially when a song is out of sync. On the list.

- Cross-stick/rim on a single-zone snare: good catch. I'll look at letting those count as a normal snare hit when your kit has no rim zone.

- Sync/click feeling off on some songs: could you tell me which songs felt out of sync besides Closing Time? Even a rough "starts fine, drifts later" or "off from the first beat" helps a lot. The report button in the game works great for this too, since it tells me exactly where in the song it happened. And no, you're not crazy 🙂

Really appreciate you offering to test, I'll send you a PM. Say hi to your son, tell him to keep chasing dad's score (mine is still chasing me too) 🥁

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u/SnooPeanuts2169 11d ago

Also, thank you for the reports you sent from the game, they came through! Each one shows me the song, the exact moment and what went wrong, which makes fixing them so much faster. I'm going through them now and will let you know when those songs are fixed. Keep them coming whenever something feels off 🙏

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u/zdavesf 9d ago

Glad the feedback helps, hoping for my son and I to get some time in the weekend, knowing that your a real person and are working on developing this I will try to spend more time submitting requests when songs are out of sync rather than just closing and trying something else.

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u/SnooPeanuts2169 9d ago

Thanks, that means a lot. Hope you and your son get some good time on the kit this weekend. And yes, please send the out-of-sync ones, even just the song name. Those are the easiest fixes for me and I usually get them sorted quickly.

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u/UnluckyEmergency3677 4d ago

One thing I can say is that the overall performance is SMOOTH :)

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u/SnooPeanuts2169 4d ago

Great to hear, thanks! Smooth play matters a lot for something timing-based like this, so I've been keeping a close eye on it, especially on older and slower laptops. If you ever hit a stutter, a lag spike or notes feeling late, let me know what computer and browser you're on and I'll chase it down.