Metronome software for Windows - with a difference - you can work with it purely visually as it uses a bouncing ball or conductor style baton bouncing under gravity. This helps one to anticipate the beats - same technique as used by conductors when they bounce the baton off an “invisible plane”.
Extremely easy to use - you’ll be able to get started right away. Also accessible for blind users - everything a sighted user can do, you can do too, except use the bouncing ball visuals of course.
Sighted users can use it with the sound switched off. Or use the visuals to help synchronise more exactly with the ticks of the metronome. This is particularly useful for rhythms with irregular beats such as swing.
You can adjust the amount of the swing, with presets of light, medium and hard swing, and gentle or strong lilt. Then you can also adjust the times and volumes of all the beats individually and skip any beats you like.
The skipped beats feature makes it easy to make dance rhythms, syncopated rhythms etc and there’s a window which lets you enter those quickly using a simple metrical notation for crotchets, quavers, dotted notes etc.
It can play just about any rhythm you can think of, with any number of beats to the bar, also including polyrhythms, additive rhythms and cycles of polyrhythms. You can also tap out a rhythm yourself for it to use, and you can get your rhythm from a recording of a groove too.
With any of these ways of making a rhythm, the bouncing ball and conductor baton style visuals will synchronise with the rhythm of your taps. This helps to make it easier to play exactly in time with your rhythm.
[quote]“It’s like having your own personal conductor to help keep you in time”[/quote]
Also has some exotic rhythms to try out - the ones with fractional beats to the bar. E.g. PI/4 where you have PI beats so the beats drift in and out of sync with the bar line. Or try the golden ratio rhythm g/4 (or phi/4) - this is the most polyrhythmic possible rhythm in a sense, takes the most possible bars for the ticks tracking the beat to approach the bar line beat.
It’s derived from my Tune Smithy software reviewed by Martin Walker in Sound on Sound here:
It takes the user friendliness to a whole new level and by splitting Tune Smithy into a separate program and with various other methods to help you navigate and understand the program it helps with the issues of users who get lost because of the abundance of features in my programs.
There are many features to this program which I think you will find nowhere else, and it is now also very user friendly and accessible as well.
This is the Eastman system for counting beats, which is widely used, and also easy to program because it is so systematic, so I’ve now added it as a separate option, to count any number of sub-beats of the beat.
I’ve added the quickset buttons here to this window, just makes it quicker to change between a few of the more common rhythms, and may make the function of this window a little clearer to a first time user.
The More and Less versions of it don’t have them so you can easily hide them if you don’t want them.
This is a small extra touch I added today for the next upload, but somehow the shadows seem to help as an extra cue to synchronise with the beats precisely as you play along.
BTW the movie shown here has no sound. When played in the rhythm player then you can choose whether to play it purely visually, or to play instruments for all the beats.
I’ve just found a way to make use of the block display below the bouncing balls to quickly adjust the rhythms.
You left click on the blocks display to add a beat to the bar and right click to subtract one. So you can e.g. change from 3/4 to 4/4 and back with a single click.
With the polyrhythms you can click on any of the layers in the display to adjust that rhythm in the polyrhythm
Adjustable Polyrhythm
There the number of blocks in each layer shows visually the number of beats in each polyrhythm. For instance in this picture the first layer, pale blue, has two blocks, so the blue ball bounces twice in each bar. You can tell which layer belongs to which of the bouncing balls as it is the same colour just faded a bit (because it doesn’t work very well visually to make them the same colour as the bouncing balls).
When you left click on a layer then an extra block is added to the layer - so its bouncing ball (i.e. the one the same colour but unfaded) will bounce an extra beat in each bar.
Similarly, when you right click on the layer, its bouncing ball bounces one less beat per bar.
I’m preparing a new tempo dial for the next upload. Here it is as it is right now:
Tempo dial showing bpm round the edge, and tempo names such as Andante, Allegro etc
The other main thing I’m working on right now is to make the Time Signature Metronome with the gravity bounce bouncing balls available as a separate program.
I expect to upload the latest with the new tempo dial and some tweaks and bug fixes for the metronome in the next day or two.
While working on the next upload, I’ve added a bouncing beat numbers option. The beat numbers will be able to be shown as numbers, or as number words, or as special characters, or a lyric line.
I’ve also uploaded them as videos on You Tube - under robertinventor (faster streaming, lower quality)
All these balls are boucing from left to right or right to left. The idea is that the metronome plays a beat each time one of the balls hits the bottom of the window.
