BeatBalance is designed to help drummers:

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• Develop their inner clock (or internal sense of tempo)

• Gain confidence playing with a click track

• Improve note spacing and clean pattern execution

• Concentrate and not ‘zone out’ while doing hand exercises

• Track progress and improvement over time

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Why are these things important?

The job of a drummer is to keep time. You're the heartbeat of the band, and everyone looks to you. Playing to a click track, playing with sequenced instruments and even pre-programmed light shows are all things that are required of the professional or semi-professional drummer.

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By developing your inner clock you'll be more confident, whatever the situation you're confronted with. Be the metronome.

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BeatBalance isn’t for all drummers

This app is aimed at people who regularly practise formalised hand exercises (or would like to do this but find them boring or dispiriting!), and want to develop their timing consistency, stability, note spacing and confidence playing without a metronome.

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Developing your inner clock

By letting you gradually practise for longer and longer periods without the sound of a metronome BeatBalance can help build a sense of what it feels like to keep steady time yourself. Because it comes back in immediately if you start to drift, the app can help you identify and correct areas in your playing which cause problems with your timekeeping.

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Gain confidence playing with a click track

It’s a reality that a lot of contemporary music is recorded and performed to a click track. As a drummer, this means that you’re faced with the challenge of trying to deliver a sensitive performance with a loud, repetitive noise overlaid on the music. This isn’t really ideal.

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Monitoring at live venues can also be…variable, and it’s not always guaranteed that you’ll be able to hear the click or backing track.

 

The more confidence you have that you can keep locked in to a click pulse even if you can’t hear it well, the quieter and sparser the click will need to be for you to be able to keep in sync. The less the click is on top of everything else, the more you can concentrate on the music.

 

Improve note spacing and clean pattern execution

BeatBalance provides instant, non-intrusive feedback on your note spacing - if you’re not executing patterns cleanly, you’ll not silence the metronome, and the visual display will help you identify when this is happening.

 

Unlike other tempo-detecting metronome apps, BeatBalance measures the timing of each individual drum stroke to within less than 1 millisecond, giving you accurate feedback on the tightness of your playing.

 

When the metronome is silent, you’ll be able to hear your playing without a metronome click obscuring it, allowing you better to judge elements like dynamic consistency.

 

Concentrate better while practising exercises

Doing hand exercises can be extremely boring!

 

It’s very easy to start zoning out, and simple repetition of an exercise without making sure that you’re executing it well is likely to be wasted practice time.

 

There are also a lot of factors to concentrate on while practising these exercises - as well as timing there is overall control of the sticks, height consistency, grip, dynamics, posture….

 

By giving you feedback on your performance, BeatBalance both makes this kind of practice less boring and takes some of the brain work out of making sure you’re playing well enough to improve.

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Track progress and improvement over time

Developing technical skill in hand exercises is a slow process - it takes years of daily practice to achieve a high standard.

 

Our performance can vary a lot from day to day, and week to week and if you’ve left a practice session feeling like you’re doing worse than last time it can be difficult to stay motivated, even if overall you are improving steadily.

 

BeatBalance saves statistics from each of your practice sessions so you can compare and track your improvement over time.