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Forty new lessons, and an app to play them in

The last two releases were about what you play on: a kit, a keyboard, a phone screen. Which left the thing you play — the lessons themselves — as the thin part. Half the catalogue was slots with numbers and no music in them. Forty of those slots are now written: 22 playable lessons become 62, and Foundations goes from two filled stages to five.

Foundations is a whole tier now

Three new stages, and none of them asks for a faster hand than Stage 2 did.

  • Space — the notes you do not play. Every pattern is a groove you already own with a beat, a half bar or a whole bar taken out of it, and coming back in exactly on time. It moves no difficulty at all, which is the point: silence is where a beginner's time actually falls apart, because inside a run of notes the hands cover for the clock.
  • The Cymbals — ride, crash and open hat, on rhythms you have already played. The first hand travel that has a musical reason rather than a rhythmic one.
  • Two Bars — form. Bar 2 answers bar 1, a crash marks the top of a four-bar phrase, and the last two beats hand it back to the beginning. Nothing finer than an 8th and nothing off the beat, so knowing where you are is the only new thing being asked of you.
The Foundations tier page, headed “Can you keep time and stack two hands?”, listing five stage cards: 1 Pulse, 2 The Backbeat, 3 Space, 4 The Cymbals, 5 Two Bars. Each has a description, an Open link and a 0/10 cleared count.
Stages 3, 4 and 5 are new. The tier's question has not changed; it now gets a full answer.

Sixteenths, triplets, and the shuffle

Vocabulary's first stage — Subdivision & the Grid — is written out too. It is the first time the grid gets finer than an 8th: 16ths, then triplets, then the feel between them, ending on the shuffle and the half-time shuffle.

The triplet module builds toward that on purpose. "Broken Triplets" is the full triplet with every middle note dropped, so by the time you reach the shuffle you have already played it — a shuffle is a triplet with a hole in it, and the lesson before it makes that true rather than merely saying so.

The lesson “1.8 The Shuffle”. Its pattern chart shows a Closed HH lane of hats in tight pairs — the second of each pair pushed late — over a Snare lane on 2 and 4 and a Kick lane on 1 and 3, with Listen and Play buttons and five practice hints.
The hats come in pairs and the second of each sits late. Everything under it is the rock beat you already play.

And it installs

Add Groove Academy to your home screen or dock and it opens in its own window, with no address bar and no browser furniture around the highway. Installing also pulls your kit, the basses and the lessons onto the device — about a megabyte — so a practice session survives the train going into a tunnel. A page you have never opened offline says so plainly instead of showing you a browser error.

The layout underneath it is a phone layout now rather than a shrunk desktop one: the nav folds into a full-screen menu, tiers, stages, lessons and posts are tappable across their whole face, the result screen fills the screen with its buttons where your thumb already is, and nothing scrolls sideways on the narrowest phone we could find. Long-pressing the installed icon jumps straight to Continue lesson, Stats or News.

The lesson catalogue on a phone. A folded header with a menu button, a yellow “Continue — Kick on Every Beat” button, then full-width tier cards for Foundations and Vocabulary and greyed cards for Music and Mastery. A strip across the bottom reads “Install Groove Academy for offline practice” with Install and Not now buttons.
The strip along the bottom is the offer, and it is an offer — Not now means not now.

Also in this release

  • The third lesson of every module was unreachable from the catalogue. "Stretch" is a curriculum word here — the hardest lesson of a module — and it is also the name of the rule that makes a card clickable all over. So the badge quietly laid a dead sheet over its own card, and every click on it went nowhere. Fixed.
  • Cymbals have a colour of their own. A crash used to take the hi-hat's colour in one lesson and the snare's in the next, depending on how many lanes that lesson happened to have. Crash, ride and the rest now share the hat's hue in every lesson, because they are the same family of thing.
  • The highway really does shrink in portrait. It was meant to and never did — the narrow setting was identical to the wide one. Notes now arrive from about three and a half beats away on a phone instead of two and a half. The transport display also used to hang off the left edge of a small screen; it drops its words for symbols when it has to.
  • Nothing loads samples while you are playing. The background download that keeps your kit warm could fire in the middle of a run. It now steps aside for Play and for Listen, which lose nothing by it — a run fetches what it needs before its first beat anyway.

Follow @groove_academy for the next update, or go play something — there is rather more of it than there was.