A free drum practice app for rudiments and timing

The curriculum is a real prerequisite tree, not a leveled list. 20 drum skills sit across four tiers, and a skill only becomes available once the ones under it are actually learned. Grip and stroke control come first because everything else, every rudiment and every fill, depends on them, and no stage skips ahead of the technique it is quietly built on.

Grip, rebound, and the four strokes

Hold the Sticks, Let the Stick Bounce, The Four Strokes, and Make Friends with the Click come before any rudiment, because a loose grip and a trustworthy rebound are what make the rest possible without your hands cramping.

Single and double stroke rudiments

Single Stroke Roll, Count It Out Loud, Double Stroke Roll, and Accents & Taps build the alternating hand control and the counted subdivision every later pattern reuses.

Subdivisions and the first combined rudiments

Sixteenths, Triplets, and Offbeats & Syncopation teach the timing grid, alongside Single Paradiddle, The Flam, Five Stroke Roll, and Play Along on the Pad, which puts the sticking to work over a real track.

Combination rudiments and speed

The Drag, Paradiddle Family, The Whip Stroke (Moeller), Open-Close-Open, and Buzz Roll chain the earlier rudiments together and build real tempo on top of clean technique instead of tension.

Every term in that list, paradiddle, flam, Moeller, buzz roll, is tappable for a plain-language explanation the moment you meet it. Drum vocabulary can sound like a foreign language the first time you read it, and nothing here assumes you already speak it.

Each night the app builds a short session from wherever you left off: a technique drill, sometimes a new rudiment, and a rhythm ear round if one is due. Technique drills use BPM laddering, so you start well under tempo and only step up after a clean run, evenly spaced, evenly loud, both hands sounding the same, which means speed gets built on top of control instead of replacing it.

Learned skills do not just sit there once you have passed them. They come back on a spaced review schedule at 1, 3, 7, and 14 days, so a rudiment you nailed weeks ago gets a chance to prove it is still there before it quietly slips. A rudiment that only ever gets played once, the day you first learn it, is not really learned. It just briefly worked.

Ear training here is rhythm dictation: you hear a short pattern and have to identify or play back its subdivision. It only ever draws on subdivisions the tree has actually taught you, so a sixteenth-note round never shows up before Sixteenths itself has been learned, and a round never tests something you have not been shown yet.

Drums in Music Practice is practice-pad-only in this version. There is no full kit, no hi-hat pedal, no bass drum, and no kick pattern. Everything here is grip, sticking, accents, and rudiments played on a single pad surface, which is also why notation renders as a count grid instead of a drum staff.

That is a real, current limit, not a caveat buried in fine print. Every rudiment in the tree is still exactly what a kit player needs underneath a groove or a fill; it is just taught and drilled on the pad rather than across toms and cymbals. If you already own a kit, treat this as the technique and rudiment layer underneath what you play on it.

Nothing. Music Practice is free, with no account required and no paywall anywhere in it. Progress saves to your own browser the moment you finish a drill, so there is nothing to sign up for before you start. The code is open source under the MIT licence and lives at github.com/astraedus/piano, so you can read exactly how the rudiment progression and the review schedule work instead of taking it on faith.

Open the app and work through the first tier tonight, no account needed. Ten minutes of grip and rebound work is a real start, not a wasted session. If something is confusing, or a rudiment's drill does not feel right on a pad, say so. The repo takes issues at github.com/astraedus/piano/issues, and feedback from people who actually practice drums is exactly what this needs next.