The drummer's metronome

Climbing to a target BPM

A plain click tells you where you are. The tempo trainer moves the goalposts for you — set a start BPM, a target, and how quickly it steps between them, and it climbs while you keep playing:

1. Find your ceiling — play your pattern along with the click and push the BPM up until it falls apart. Type the number straight into the display if you already know roughly where you are, drag the slider to hunt for it, or tap four beats on Tap tempo to catch the speed you're already playing. That number minus about 50 is your trainer start point, exactly as in our guide to drumming faster.
2. Set the trainer (members) — start BPM, target BPM, and how fast it climbs (the default +5 every 4 bars is a good place to begin). Press start and stay relaxed; if your hands tense up, you've climbed too fast.
3. Accent with intent — tap the beat dots to move the accent around. Practising with accents on 2 and 4 (or beat 1 of a 7/8 grouping, for members) sharpens your time far more than a flat click.

Gap click: training your internal clock

Playing in time with a metronome and keeping time are two different skills, and only one of them survives the click being switched off. Turn on the gap click and the metronome drops out for a set number of bars — one bar on, one bar off to begin with — while the beat dots keep moving so you can still see where the bar is.

Keep playing through the silence. When the click comes back you find out, instantly and without argument, whether you drifted. If you rushed, the click lands late; if you dragged, it lands early. Widen the gap to two or four silent bars as your time steadies.

Odd time signatures and meter loops

Not every groove lives in straight 4/4. The time signature menu covers 2/4, 3/4, 5/4, 6/4 and 7/4 as well as 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, 9/8 and 12/8, and the accents move independently in each — so you can put the emphasis on beat 1 of a 3+2+2 grouping in 7/8 and actually hear the shape of the bar rather than seven flat clicks.

Meter loops go a step further: chain bar groups together and the click cycles through them while you play. Two bars of 4/4 into one of 7/8 into one of 3/4, repeating, is a far better test of your counting than any single signature on its own — and it's how a good deal of prog and math rock actually moves.

Subdivisions and accents

The subdivision menu fills the gaps between beats with eighths, triplets or sixteenths, at a quieter pitch than the beat itself. It's the fastest way to stop a fast passage turning to mush: if your sixteenths are uneven, a sixteenth-note click exposes it in one bar.

Accents are the other half. Tap any beat dot to accent it or clear it, and the pattern sticks per time signature. A click that only accents beats 2 and 4 forces you to hold the downbeat yourself — most of the way to a gap click, and a good stepping stone to one.

Where to go next

Warmed up and in tune? Give your kit the once-over with the drum tuner, or see how fast the pros' setups really are in the Rig Vault. Worth writing down where you finished in the practice log — a tempo you can't remember is a tempo you climb twice.