Hey, folks, I have no stake in this app at all except as a very happy user, and I thought I’d mention it to the PianoGroove community.
Pretty much all of us could use more practice with a metronome, but there’s actually something better than a metronome for most of the common time signatures! A fellow player put me onto this app called Drumgenius (available for at least iOS and Android) and I’ve been using it regularly ever since in my own practice.
The app has a library of drumbeats, mostly centered around jazz, but also including genres like pop, R&B, marches, reggae, samba, etc., etc.
If money is an issue you can buy one of the limited deals but once I understood how much more fun and relaxed it is to practice with a drumbeat that feels right, I had no trouble justifying the cost of unlimited use. I don’t remember how much it was (pretty sure it was well under $20 US); in any case it wasn’t much. The unlimited deal gets you downloads of any and all of the drumbeats, and there must be literally hundreds of them.
When you get ready to practice a tune, you open a category of beats that seems like it would fit (like if I want to practice “Oleo” I would pick the medium-up swing category), and then within that category you select the specific beat you want. Most of them are really faithful recreations of patterns used by the great drummers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Within limits, you can adjust the tempo of each pattern so it’s easy to start at a more moderate tempo and work up as you improve. You can also adjust the pitch of the sounds the app uses; I haven’t found a lot of utility in that feature, but it might be really handy for certain tunes where the pitch of one or two drums is really important.
Anyway, check it out. It will make your practice more fun.
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/drumgenius/id492279351
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.maurobattisti.drumgenius&hl=en_US
