Finger drumming practice

Four ways to practise finger drumming

Groove: timing

An endless beat that keeps changing. You start with a steady kick and add the snare, hi-hats and open hats as you go. After that every phrase is a new variation with syncopated kicks, pickups and fills. Hit within 40 milliseconds for a Perfect. Anything close is marked Early or Late, so you know which way to adjust. A miss only drops your combo one step. It doesn't reset it. On ghost bars the notes disappear and you keep the groove going from memory. That's the point of the game: feeling the beat, not reading it. Once you reach level 4, 7 or 10, you can start your next run there.

Orbit: polyrhythms

Two hands, two pulses, one cycle. A hand sweeps round a circle. Your left hand plays the corners of one shape and your right hand plays the corners of the other. Start with 3 against 2, then work up through 4:3, 5:4 and 5:3 to 7:4. Every four clean cycles the tempo goes up and the shapes fade, until you're playing by feel. If both hands at once is too much, set You play to one hand and let the other play for you. Set Click to Grid to hear every step both hands can land on.

Speed Ladder: rudiments

Drummers' rudiments work just as well for two fingers or two hands: single strokes, double strokes, the paradiddle, triplets, the paradiddle-diddle and the double paradiddle. The sticking scrolls past and loops forever. Every 8 clean hits the tempo climbs 2 BPM, and a miss knocks it back 4. Your peak tempo is saved for each rudiment, and the next session starts at 70% of it, like a proper warm-up.

Echo: your ear

Call and response, the way hand drummers learn. Four hand drums (bass, tone, slap and a high drum) play a phrase, and you play it back in the next bar. Afterwards you see the call and your answer side by side. Phrases grow longer and busier. From round 3 the call is hidden while you answer, and from round 6 every other call is ears only. There's also a Daily: five rounds, the same for everyone, one try, with a score to share.

Finger drumming on a keyboard

Every game works on a computer keyboard. There are no menus to learn: rest your fingers and play.

• Groove: Z kick, X snare, C hat, V open hat. That's the bottom row of the drum pad on the home page and the app, so it carries over. D F J K work too.
• Orbit and Speed Ladder: F for your left hand, J for your right. Any key on each half of the keyboard also works.
• Echo: R U for the top two drums, F J for the bottom two.
• Space starts a run, Esc stops it.

No pads at all? Plenty of people practise finger drumming on a table. It works, but you get no feedback. Here every hit is timed, so you know straight away whether you rushed.

Polyrhythms, counted

A polyrhythm is two even pulses that share a cycle. To hear how they fit, split the cycle into a grid both can land on. For 3 against 2 that's six steps. The left hand plays 1 and 4, the right hand plays 1, 3 and 5. Together they make both, right, left, right. The strip under the Orbit circle draws this grid for every ratio. 4 against 3 needs twelve steps and 7 against 4 needs twenty-eight, which is why it's the expert ring.

A 10-minute practice routine

1. Warm up (2 min). Speed Ladder, single strokes. It starts at 70% of your best.
2. Groove (4 min). Aim to reach one level higher than last time.
3. Orbit (2 min). One ratio a week. Try one hand at a time first.
4. Echo Daily (2 min). Five rounds to finish, then share your score.