Rhythm Lab — Learn Rhythm & Write It Down

What is Rhythm Lab?

Hear a rhythm, write it down

Rhythm Lab trains the ability to read and write rhythm. Rhythm is ultimately a question of when you hit — endlessly confusing to describe in words, and a wall for beginners in standard notation. So this module draws it as cells: time across, instruments down. Heavy vertical lines start a bar, lighter ones mark the beats, and one cell is an eighth or a sixteenth note. Seen that way, a quarter note is simply "one every four cells" and syncopation is "the cell that dodges the strong beat".

There are two pages. Learn Rhythm comes first: fourteen lessons, one idea per screen, from beats, bars, time signatures, note lengths and rests through the backbeat, the role of the hi-hat, the kick/snare/hat three-layer structure, syncopation, sixteenths and ghost notes, triplets and shuffle, and 6/8. No lesson ends in reading — each one asks you to place what you just read onto the same grid.

Proving it in dictation

Rhythm Dictation is the classic ear-training format. A drum pattern plays, you copy it onto the grid, and it is graded cell by cell. Hits, misses and extras are drawn where they happened, and a hit with the right timing on the wrong drum is called out separately — the point of the grading is to show you where you went wrong, not merely that you did. Accuracy is hits divided by (hits + misses + extras), so filling in everything does not raise your score.

Five stages, starting from a single kick lane and moving through kick against snare, the hi-hat closed and open, the real skeletons of disco, rock, boom bap, funk, reggae and bossa nova, and finally tom fills, crashes, syncopation, triplets and 6/8. Nothing is locked — the order is a recommendation, and if a later stage looks interesting you are welcome to go and look.

The drums you hear are recordings of one real kit, not synthesis: kick, snare, hats, toms and cymbals from the MuldjordKit, recorded in a single room by Lars Muldjord in 2010 and released under CC BY 4.0. Only the hand clap comes from elsewhere — the Versilian Community Sample Library, CC0 — because a clap is not a drum-kit instrument. The crash and the ride are genuinely different cymbals, and the three toms are three different drums. The hi-hat behaves like the real instrument, too — strike the closed hat while an open one is ringing and the ring stops dead.