For people who practice alone
You can’t hear
yourself rush.
Your ears are busy playing. Mine are not. Record forty-five seconds on your phone and I will place every stroke against the click, in milliseconds, then give you the one thing to change.
No account. Your first take comes back in about a minute.
“The boom comes from letting the plate vibrate. Bounce off it. If your hand stays on the wood you get a thud, not a boom.”
Exercise 3-1 · your first groove
Boom, tick, crack, tick
B bass, palm at the middle · S snare, fingers at the top edge · g ghost, a whisper
Play it, and this is what I send back
example takeEvery hit, vs the click
center line = exactly on the click · shaded band = within 30ms · ● tight (<30ms) · ● okay (30-60) · ● off (>60)
- median off
- 21ms
- inside 30ms
- 68%
- tendency
- rushing
- 0:00
Hear it
I play the pattern at whatever tempo you can hold, with a count-in and a click underneath.
- 0:15
Play it
Prop your phone against a wall and record. No gear, nothing to learn, no take wasted.
- 0:55
I answer
Every stroke placed against the click, what I heard in your tone, and one thing to change.
Three sounds. That is the whole instrument.
A cajón makes three noises worth naming, and where your hand lands decides which one you get. Level 1 is nothing but making each of them cleanly. Press one.
Where the box came from
The first one was a shipping crate.
Enslaved Africans on the Peruvian coast built the first cajones out of the crates they were made to work with, at a time when their own drums were banned. In 1977 Paco de Lucía heard one at a party in Lima, took it home, and his percussionist Rubem Dantas carried it into flamenco. It has been in half the world’s music ever since, and it is still the only drum you can hold under one arm, sit down on, and play.
You’ll know how far off you were.
Not “a little rushed”. Twenty-one milliseconds early on the median stroke, worst on the third beat, sliding later as your shoulders tire. Every stroke you play is placed against the click, and the gap between them is what we work on.
- Which strokes, not “your timing”
- Every stroke in the take gets its own number: how far it landed from the click, early or late, and whether the drift gets worse as you go.
- Your hands only
- The click in your ears is never counted as one of your notes. What comes back is what you played, nothing else.
- Better than Tuesday, or not
- The same exercise measured the same way every time, so progress is something you can see instead of something you hope you felt.
- I can’t flatter you
- I get the numbers before I say a word. If you were 40ms early, that is what you hear from me, along with the one thing to do about it tonight.
What I send back
Not a score and a shrug. I name what I heard, compare it to your last take with numbers, give you three fixes at most in priority order, and turn the first one into a drill you can do in the next minute.
I am an AI coach. I listen to the audio itself, read the millisecond measurements from every take, and teach from one fixed method of 21 exercises.
“The backbeat is honest and your bass tone opened up compared to Tuesday: 21ms median against 34ms. The ghosts are the problem. They are almost as loud as the snare, so the bar reads as eight equal notes instead of a groove.”
1. Ghosts are too loud
A groove needs a floor to speak from. If everything is loud, nothing is.
DRILLPlay the bar with the ghosts silent, four times. Then let them back in at the quietest volume you can still feel.
Next take: one thing. Keep the ghosts under the snare, even if the tempo drops to 70.
First boom to first groove, and past it
Twenty-one exercises in five levels. Nothing is locked, but the order is the order for a reason: every level is built out of the one below it.
- 01The Three SoundsBass, ghost, and snare - build each sound cleanly before speed.
- 02Steady TimeLock to the metronome. Time is the instrument.
- 03Your First GrooveThe pattern behind half the songs you know.
- 04Sixteenths & FillsFaster hands, moving accents, your first fill.
- 05Styles & MusicalityLatin keys, laid-back pop, and playing with real music.
Your box is right there.
Exercise 1-1 is forty-five seconds of quarter notes. Nobody has ever regretted the first take.
Start at exercise 1-1