Rimshot
Tempo changes
Practice the transitions.
Most pieces don't stay at one tempo. There's a ritardando into the bridge, a jump from 96 to 144, a bar of 7/8 before the chorus. A normal metronome holds one tempo, so you practice each section on its own, and the change itself first gets played in rehearsal. Rimshot changes with the music, so you can practice the change.
Loop a ritardando
2 bars of 4/4 at 132, a 2-bar ritardando to 84, then 2 bars of 3/4 at 84. With Loop on, it counts off and goes again.
Why transitions fall apart
With a regular metronome, playing through a tempo change means stopping, changing the number and starting again. That gap is exactly the moment you needed to practice. You learn both tempos and never the move between them, so in rehearsal the new tempo comes in late, rushed, or somewhere in between.
Build the piece once
In Rimshot, a show is a list of measure groups. Each group has its own number of measures, tempo and time signature. Letter the sections to match your part. Press play and every change lands on the downbeat where it's written.
- Measure groupsCount, tempo, meter
- Time signatureChange it every bar
- Tempo rampsAccelerando or ritardando
- Section lettersA to Z
Loop the bars around the change
Set the loop to start a couple of bars before the change and end a couple of bars after it. Rimshot plays that stretch, counts off two measures, and goes again. Run it twenty times in a row without touching your phone, then widen the loop to a whole section.
Ramps for accelerando and ritardando
Turn a group into a ramp and Rimshot moves from one tempo to the next beat by beat, across as many measures as you give it. A ramp can start from wherever the group before it left off, so a rit. that follows a fast section always begins at the right tempo.
Meter changes without the math
Going from 4/4 to 7/8, or slipping in a bar of 2/4, is a counting problem as much as a tempo one. Rimshot accents the downbeat of every bar, so you hear where the new bar starts. Add eighth or triplet subdivisions to any group to feel the pulse inside it.
Take the click away
Once the transition holds, silence the click for a bar or two on either side of it and see whether you land the new tempo on your own. Silence any beat, or every beat in a group, and bring the click back to check where you ended up.
Then play it start to finish
Turn off the loop and Rimshot runs the whole piece from the first bar to the last. Share the show as a link or QR code, and everyone in the group practices the same changes at the same tempos, on iPhone or Android.
See how this works for musical theater and marching band.