Every musician needs a good ear.  Not just a good ear for pitch, but more importantly a good ear for time.  I remember the days of my teacher having me clap to the rhythm of the metronome for practice.  This practice extended to playing the notes of the song with only claps but trying to still keep the proper time.  I’m a rusher – I tend to rush and my internal clock just continues increasing speed after every so many bars.  The only way to remove such poor form is through lots of practice – and practice I did!  Now, there is a utility for the iPhone called iKeepTime that is perfect for those internal metronome synchronizations.  Let’s enter the JAMM labs and find out just how easy it is to tune your internal timer with iKeepTime!

This is the main screen.  The big metal bar is the plate you need to tap.  The meter above will show you the drag or rushes based on the reference time.  Clicking on the information button will bring your to settings screen where you can set up your desired difficulty, tempo, or see the instructions for the program.

This is the settings screen.  From here, I’ll choose my options such as the tempo desired.  For a quarter note it can go as slow as 40 and all the way as high as 200.  Practice vs Quick Test – I’ll choose quick test.  The difference between practice and test is that for the quick test, you’ll only be given 16 measures.  The practice mode is endless.  The differences between the difficulty levels are how many guided beats you get and how many unguided.  Easy always gives you guide beats (you’ll always hear the metronome).  Medium gives you 3 guided measures with the metronome followed by 1 unguided where the metronome is off thereby testing your internal clock..  Hard gives you 2 guided measures and 2 unguided measures.  Let’s just briefly look at the "help” screen before we start.  Simple enough..just tap to the beat…let’s go back to the settings screen and begin the test.

This is what I see when I’m tapping.  The 86.4 you see is my score / current accuracy.  The circles underneath show the four beats to the measure.  The circles will light when a beat is supposed to be tapped so even if I turned off all the sounds and just used the circles I tended to be at a 67.5% accuracy even on hard – YAY!

Now, playing with the tapper in all seriousness, I was able to improve my accuracy score by about 3-7%.  That’s not bad at all.  All in all this was a fun way of practicing rhythm.  As it’s on the iPod for me, I can be practicing anywhere whether it be in between customers, during my 15 min. breaks, waiting at the bus stop, etc.  This is one very handy musician’s training tool.  I highly recommend it!