Pulse Pocket Metronome Guide

Quick facts

What Pulse Pocket is for

Most metronome apps give you a click and leave the rest to you. The student hears a pulse, plays something that feels close, and has no way to tell whether the notes actually landed where they belong.

Pulse Pocket closes that gap. It shows the rhythm on a staff while it plays it — the same notation the student reads on the page, with the note being sounded lit up as it happens. Underneath, it can show the counting syllables and the sticking. So instead of hear a click, hope for the best, the student gets four things lined up at once: the sound, the notation, the count, and the hands.

That's the whole idea. When those four agree, rhythm stops being guesswork.

It's built specifically for percussion. Two counting systems that band directors and studio teachers actually use, sticking display with real hand logic, and subdivisions organized the way a beginner learns them.

It's built to be revealed gradually. Subdivisions and Combination Rhythms each have their own on/off switch. A first-year student opens it and sees a plain metronome — nothing else. The teacher turns on one layer at a time as the student is ready. Nobody gets handed a wall of buttons.

Start here: your first minute

  1. Press Play. You get a plain metronome at 120 BPM in 4/4. That's the whole app until you ask for more.

  2. Set your tempo. Type it, nudge it with −5 / −1 / +1 / +5, or hit Tap Tempo and tap along four times. The tempo marking beside the number (Moderato, Allegro, and so on) updates with you — a free vocabulary lesson every time you change speed.

  3. Turn on Subdivisions & Patterns. Pick a subdivision for the whole measure, or click the small menu under any single beat on the staff to change just that beat.

  4. Turn on Counting, Sticking, or both. They appear under the notes.

  5. Press Play again and watch the highlight move. Say the counting out loud with it before you play anything. That single habit is worth more than any other feature in the app.

  6. Press R to reset back to 4/4 quarter notes at 120 BPM whenever things get away from you.

Reading the screen

The staff is the main event. A few things to point out to a student:

  • The moving highlight marks the note sounding right now. If the student's hands and the highlight disagree, that's the whole diagnosis.

  • Beams and tuplet brackets are drawn properly — eighths beam in pairs, triplets get a bracket and a 3. It looks like real music because students have to read real music.

  • Hollow noteheads with counts in (parentheses) are silent pulses. The student still counts them. They just don't play them. This is how you teach rests without the rest becoming a hole in the count.

  • The dot legend — downbeat, beat, subdivision — tells you what weight each pulse carries in the measure.

The layers, in teaching order

Subdivisions

Quarter notes, eighths, triplets, sixteenths. The core vocabulary for a beginner and intermediate percussionist.

Set every beat at once from the Subdivisions row, or use the per-beat menu on the staff to change one beat and leave the rest alone. The per-beat menu is the more useful of the two once a student is past the basics — it's how you isolate the one beat that keeps falling apart.

Patterns

A pattern mixes notes and rests inside a single beat. Pick a subdivision first; the pattern choices for that subdivision then appear, grouped by how many notes actually sound.

This is the step where most students break. A beat of four sixteenths where the second one is silent is a completely different physical motion from four even sixteenths — but it's the same count. Showing the silent pulse as a hollow note with its count in parentheses keeps the grid intact in the student's head while the hands learn to skip.

Counting

Choose Off, Standard, Eastman, or Both.

  • Standard — the traditional American band-room count: 1 e & a for sixteenths, 1 trip let for triplets. This is what most students arrive already knowing and what most ensemble directors will say from the podium.

  • Eastman — the McHose/Tibbs system: 1 te for eighths, 1 la li for triplets, 1 ti te ta for sixteenths. Every subdivision level gets its own distinct syllables, so the syllable itself tells you where you are in the beat. Common in college theory and aural skills programs, and widely taught in Texas band rooms.

When to use which: teach the one your program uses. Use Both when a student is moving between two worlds — a high school player starting college auditions, or a studio student whose school band uses a different system than you do. Seeing the two stacked makes the translation obvious instead of confusing.

If your program counts sixteenths as "ta te ta"

You'll run into two versions of Eastman sixteenths in the field: 1 ti te ta and 1 ta te ta. Pulse Pocket supports both.

When Counting is set to Eastman or Both, a Sixteenths row appears with the two variants written out — click the one your program uses. The app remembers your choice on that device, and everything follows it: the rendered counts, the parenthesized counts on silent pulses, and the helper text.

Teachers: you can bake the choice into a link. Add ?eastman=ta (or ?eastman=ti) to the app URL and share that — students open it and see your program's syllables with nothing to configure.

The ta version is what appears in the original McHose/Tibbs materials. Its logic is that te marks the midpoint of the beat at every division level — eighths are 1 te, and sixteenths fill in around that same te with ta on either side. The ti version is a widely taught variant that gives the first sixteenth its own distinct syllable instead. Both do the same job, which is the part that actually matters: every position in the beat gets its own syllable, so the syllable itself tells the student where they are. That's what separates Eastman from 1 e & a, where "e" and "a" say nothing about which half of the beat you're in. The difference is one syllable in one position — a student who learned one can read the other in about a minute.

Sticking

Choose Off, Natural, or Alternate. Sticking shows as R/L under each played note.

  • Natural — each hand stays tied to its position in the grid. Rests don't change hands. If the right hand owns the downbeat, it owns the downbeat every measure, whether or not the note in between gets played.

  • Alternate — hands switch on every played note. Rests shift the pattern, so the hand that starts each measure can flip.

Why this matters: these two produce genuinely different results the moment rests enter the picture, and students who don't understand the difference end up with inconsistent sticking they can't reproduce. Run the same pattern both ways and let them hear which one they've been doing by accident.

Combination Rhythms

Give each beat its own rhythm. This is where the app stops being a metronome and starts being an exercise generator.

Presets fill the measure beat by beat and repeat the sequence if the measure is longer than the preset. Hover a preset to see its recipe before you commit to it.

There are three:

  • Build-Up — works up through the subdivision levels. The one to start a beginner on.

  • 16th Combinations — the sixteenth-note figures students hit most often in literature.

  • Trips & 16ths — moves between triplet and sixteenth feel, the switch that trips up most intermediate players.

Build combinations by hand for the exact figure that's giving a student trouble, or start from a preset and modify one beat.

Time signature

2/4, 3/4, 4/4 (C = common time), and 2/2 (¢ = cut time).

C and ¢ contain the same notes. The difference is feel: common time is felt in 4 with the quarter note taking the beat, cut time is felt in 2 with the half note taking the beat. Switch between them while the app is playing — the notes don't change, the pulse does. That's a hard concept to explain in words and an easy one to demonstrate in five seconds.

Volume and Accents

Volume sets the click level. Accents control which pulses get emphasized, so the downbeat reads as a downbeat and the measure has a shape instead of being an undifferentiated stream of clicks.

Turn accents off deliberately when you want to test whether a student is actually feeling the measure or just riding the accent.

Control reference

Control What it does Play / Stop Starts and stops the metronome. Keyboard: Space Tempo (BPM) Current tempo, with its Italian tempo marking beside it −5 / −1 / +1 / +5 Nudge the tempo. Keyboard: ↑ / ↓ Tap Tempo Tap a pulse to set the tempo. Keyboard: T ↺ Reset Back to 4/4 quarter notes at 120 BPM. Keyboard: R Volume Click level Accents Emphasis on downbeats and strong beats Time Signature 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 (C), 2/2 (¢) Per-beat menu Change the subdivision of one beat, on the staff Subdivisions & Patterns On/off. Subdivision for all beats, plus note-and-rest patterns within a beat Combination Rhythms On/off. Per-beat rhythms and presets Counting Off · Standard · Eastman · Both Sixteenths 1 ti te ta · 1 ta te ta — Eastman sixteenth variant; appears when Eastman or Both is on. Shareable via ?eastman=ta in the URL Sticking Off · Natural · Alternate

Practice recipes

Diagnose a shaky beat. Set the full measure to the rhythm in question. Play it slowly with Counting on and the student only counting out loud — no sticks. If the counting is solid, the problem is in the hands. If it isn't, the problem was never in the hands.

Build a rest into the grid. Play the beat with every pulse sounding. Then switch to the pattern with the rest. The hollow note stays visible in the same place — the student sees that nothing moved, one thing just went quiet.

Take a combination up to tempo. Start 20 BPM under target. Play it four times clean. +5. Repeat. The nudge buttons exist so this doesn't require thinking about numbers.

Translate between counting systems. Set Counting to Both, pick one measure, and have the student say it in each system back to back at a slow tempo.

Teach cut time. Set 4/4 with eighth notes running. Press Play. Switch to ¢ mid-playback. Ask what changed. (Nothing, and everything.)

Project it for the room. Turn on Counting, put it on the board, and let the whole section count the measure together before anyone plays.

Keyboard and devices

Key Action Space Play / stop T Tap tempo R Reset ↑ / ↓ Change tempo

Core transport and tempo controls work from the keyboard. The layout is responsive and designed for phones, tablets, computers, and classroom displays — the same URL works on all of them, so a private student opening it at home sees exactly what you demonstrated in the lesson.

Privacy

Pulse Pocket requires no account and has no backend. It runs entirely in the browser and does not collect student or practice data.

Help and feedback

When reporting a problem, include the app name, build, page URL, browser, what you expected, and what happened.

About

Pulse Pocket is a forever-free Backwerd Rhythm Shop practice app.

© 2026 Backwerd Rimshot, LLC. All rights reserved.