Description of App
Way more than a metronome, the Time Trainer adds three training tools to help you develop your own internal sense of time!
This is an accurate and stable metronome - you will find nearly all the metronome apps are not even close to accurate!! It has tap tempo, a few different sounds, accent control for odd time playing, visual metronome movement with a flash on the beat - but then we add to that with three training tools: Bar Breaks, Random Beat Drop and Speed Up.
- Bar Breaks • will mute the metronome for a bar or more forcing you to keep your time solid and be perfectly syncronised when the clicks return! This is a superb exercise and will really help develop confidence in holding your tempo. You can adjust how many bars are solid at the start then how many bars are solid and how many bars are muted which will cycle for the duration of the session. You can also select "random" mode and a % of bars (that you set) that will be dropped for an even more challenging practice session!
- Random Beat Drop • does exactly what it says on the tin... some of the beats (clicks) will be muted at random, forcing you to be confident with your time and not rely on the click too much. Many people chase the beat or try and anticpate it, and this exercise will help you stop those bad habbits! I've personally found that the "gradual" setting is most useful, a five minute session starting at 100% with more and more beats muted up to the % that you set.
- Speed Up • is a tool I have wanted for years for my own practice so now I made one. Often when working on scales, arpeggios or licks you want to start at an easy speed where you are playing it 100% correctly and gradually push your technique by playing it faster and faster. With this tool you set a start tempo, end tempo and duration fo you practice session and off you go, no more stopping to bump the bpm up a few notches every minute!
I'm sure you will find all of the tools very useful, and of course you will find full support on the justinguitar community forum - please take the time to rate and review it, good things will help promote it and anything negative will help me improve it!
Wishing you many happy hours of practice :) Justin
Comments
Accessiblity of app
Definitely not one for the full accessibility rating yet
yes, I totally screwed up the fields.
TRIED THE BEST, BOUGHT THE BEST!
I was going to review this app as well, so will just add my comments here.
I'm one of those folks afflicted with perfect pitch, so most modern metronomes that emit a beep or other pitched sound drive me crazy! Time Trainer emits clicks, pops, other short sounds that don't distract me at all, and those sounds are short enough that I can really work on getting in the pocket - meaning playing right on top of the click, so it seems to disappear. Awesome! Also, the training modes are excellent and not found in other metronome apps!
Most of the accessibility concerns mentioned seem to have been addressed so perhaps the review should be updated to reflect the increased usability.
That said, is there a way to quickly and confidently adjust BPM in the Speed Upper Options screen? The starting tempo default of 60 is fine, but if I wanted to adjust the upper limit to say 130, I end up swiping right at least a hundred times to get there. There seems to be no way to do this quickly unless I'm forgetting a Voiceover gesture for moving in larger increments. And, God help you if you mess up one of those swipes, and have to start over at 10 BPM or less! I must have spent ten minutes trying to get it to 130 and stay there! Is there something I'm missing here?
By the way, Justin's guitar lessons are great. I learned a lot from his introductory funk and Travis picking stuff. Not all great guitar players are great teachers, but Justin seems to be both. :)