HappyFeet practice mode lets you measure your timekeeping accuracy.
Tapping your foot may be the most natural thing in the world, but doing it accurately takes some practice. Our Chief Drumming Officer Wilma's first drumming teacher told her that before getting fancy on percussion, the fundamental skill is to keep a steady beat for 3 minutes. We added Practice Mode in Release 22 of the app to give you a tool to measure how you're doing.
You can choose Practice as one of the play modes from the home screen. This will bring up the Practice Mode screen.
To use Practice Mode, follow these steps:
- choose a sound to be played on each beat, like cowbell in the image above. (The world needs more cowbell!)
- set your target tempo e.g. 100BPM
- enable beats
- Tap your foot
The screen will show you three pieces of information that are updated on each beat:
- the tempo in beats per minute. The background of the measured tempo will give you a quick visual guide: blue for close, red for slow down, green for speed up.
- the error from your target tempo
- your “streak count”: how many beats in a row have been within +/-5BPM of your target BPM. This counter will reset to zero every time your tempo is more than 5BPM away from the target.
Have fun with it. While tapping your foot is pretty simple, we think you'll find that doing it at a fixed tempo isn't all that easy. This is a good way to develop your natural rhythm.
