About Rafa

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.

That is said first because a name shaped like a person’s carries an implied biography, and you should not have to work out on your own whether somebody is really listening. Nobody is. A machine is, very carefully.

Why this exists

There is one problem that every self-taught player has and no amount of practice solves: you cannot hear your own time. Your ears are busy playing. You can concentrate as hard as you like and you will still not notice that you are landing thirty milliseconds early on every backbeat, because the version of the take you hear is the one your hands are already committed to.

A teacher fixes that in one sentence. Teachers cost money, need scheduling, and mean playing badly in front of a stranger, which is why so many people who own a cajón have never had a lesson and have been playing the same bar for two years.

What actually happens to a take

You record forty-five seconds on your phone. Before I say anything, the recording is measured: every stroke you played is found and placed against the metronome click, so the numbers exist before my opinion does. Then I get the audio and the numbers together.

It matters which is which. The measurements are final on timing and I cannot argue with them, so I cannot flatter you about it. My ears are for the things numbers are bad at: tone, dynamics, whether a bar sounds like music. If you were forty milliseconds early, that is what you will hear from me, along with the one thing to do about it tonight.

The method

21 exercises in 5 levels, from finding your first bass tone to playing along to a song. It does not adapt into something unrecognisable, it does not generate new exercises at you, and it is the same for everybody. What changes is what I tell you about your own playing. Nothing is locked, so you can jump around, but the order is the order for a reason: every level is built out of the one below it.

The whole method is here, and it is free.

Who it is for

People who practise alone. At home, in the evening, ten or twenty minutes at a time, phone propped against something, with guilty gaps of a week or two. If you have a box, can roughly hold a groove, and have never had anybody listen to you play and tell you what to fix, this was built for you.

Your recordings

They are private to your account. They are used to give you feedback and to compare one take with the next, which is the only way progress becomes something you can see rather than something you hope you felt. Nobody else can play them back.

The terminology, so we are not talking past each other

Three sounds, three names, used the same way everywhere on this site: bass for the full hand in the centre, snare for the crack at the top corner, and ghost for the very quiet fingertip taps in between. Other people use other words. These are the three you will hear from me.