Drum practice in your browser, with or without an electronic kit
Practice grooves and exercises with a metronome, a count-in and loops, and keep a record of every session.
GrooveDojo is free, with no account required and nothing to install. After your first visit, it can also open and play without an internet connection (what’s been tested offline). It’s made for focused practice: slow a pattern down, loop the bars that need work, and bring it back up to tempo.
Practice Mode
Open any groove or exercise in Practice Mode and press Play. The groove repeats loop after loop, and a cursor in the notation shows where you are. Stop ends a run, not your practice: change the tempo and play again, and every run counts toward the session.
- Count-in. Clicks before the first bar.
- The click. On the beats, or on every 8th, 16th or triplet, with the first beat of the bar loudest unless you change it.
- Loop. Practice a section, or press a bar’s number on the notation, and only those bars repeat until you change it.
- Pause between loops. A rest between loops, if you want one.
- Tempo ramp. With a kit connected, the tempo steps up from a start tempo toward your goal after a number of clean loops in a row.
Without an electronic kit
Playing along is a complete way to practice. Use an acoustic kit, a practice pad or anything else you play on, and follow the click and the notation. Your runs are kept with their tempo and loops, and the Dashboard counts your practice days and minutes, as it does for practice with a kit.
What a kit adds is your timing. Without one, GrooveDojo has no hits to measure, so there’s no timing feedback: no early or late marks, and no timing in the review. For that, connect an electronic kit over MIDI (timing feedback and session review).
Exercises to start from
GrooveDojo comes with 16 exercises written for it, in three groups: rudiments, timing and coordination. Each has its own page with its notation. The Build-up, on 6 exercises, adds an introductory bar before the exercise’s own pattern. Copy to My grooves makes any exercise a groove you can change.
Your Dashboard and practice history
The Dashboard is where GrooveDojo opens. Practice activity shows your minutes in the last 7 days, how many days you’ve practiced and how many sessions, with a calendar of your practice days. Continue practicing takes you back to what you played last, and Ways to practice leads to the exercises, the Independence Trainer and your plans.
Practice history lists every session a month at a time, whether it was a groove, an exercise or a trainer setup, and each one opens its review. An exercise’s page, the Independence Trainer’s and a day on the calendar show their latest sessions too.
Played along without a kit, a session keeps which groove or exercise you practiced, at which tempos and for how long, but not the notes themselves, since GrooveDojo reads those only from a kit. With a kit, its review also has your timing (what the review shows). Your history is saved in your browser, on this device, so back it up now and then (keeping your library safe).
The Independence Trainer
For coordination, the Independence Trainer keeps a hi-hat or ride ostinato going while the kick and snare work through numbered exercises, with or without a kit (how the Independence Trainer works).
The Improvisation Trainer
To practice making things up, the Improvisation Trainer gives each beat a subdivision to improvise in, on any drums you like (how the Improvisation Trainer works).
Practice plans and a weekly schedule
A practice plan puts exercises and grooves in order, each step with its tempo and its duration, and the Dashboard shows the plan for the day. How practice plans work explains building one, following it and sharing it.
Want to practice your own grooves? Write them in the groove editor.