Tating

Drum notation by touch. Hear it, read it, practise it. One purchase, no ads.

Tating is a drum notation editor built for a touchscreen and for drummers.

Tap out a groove on the grid, hear it played back with real sounds, and read it as proper notation. No account, no sign-in, and no signal needed.

BUILT FOR FINGERS Tap a cell to place a note. Press, hold and drag to paint a run of them. Flick up from a cell for that row's second sound — the open hat under the closed one, the ghost note under the backbeat. Press and hold a note for that drum's other sounds, with the full list one tap further.

A DRUMMER'S VOCABULARY Ghost notes, accents, flams, drags, buzz strokes, cross stick, open, closed and tight hi-hats, hi-hat with the foot, ride and ride bell. Stickings are written under the staff and can be tapped in on a row of their own.

Useful kit sounds, including hand percussion — congas, bongos, djembe, clave, woodblocks, shaker, tambourine and more — playable from the tom rows.

EVERY METER, PROPERLY Time signatures from 4/4 to 7/8, 9/16 and 13/16, on straight or triplet grids, quarter notes down to 32nds. Odd meters are beamed and counted the way drummers group them, not the way a spreadsheet would.

PLAY ALONG A click, a count-in, and swing. Mute the snare and play it yourself while the rest of the kit keeps time.

PRACTICE PROPERLY Loop a couple of bars. Climb the tempo every few bars, or wind it down. Have the groove drop out for a bar or two and find out whether you are still with it when it comes back. Set the feel from straight to deep in the pocket and hear a laid-back backbeat before you try to play one. A counter tells you which bar you are on and how long you have played.

WORK A RUDIMENT ROUND Write a paradiddle, then have Tating turn it over every 2, 4 or 8 bars while you keep playing — every inversion in one pass, without a hand leaving the sticks. Displace the whole groove instead and the backbeat moves against the barline. Fill a sticking row with all rights, all lefts or alternating hands in one press.

WRITE THE SONG DOWN Gig charts: a song as its form — intro, verse, chorus, the repeats and the road map — for a music stand, beside your grooves.

POCKETCHECK Play the groove on a real kit and see where every hit actually landed against the beat. It measures the speaker-to-microphone round trip first, so the reading is honest. It reports placement rather than marking you: sitting behind the beat is a feel, and what matters is how tight the cloud is.

The microphone is used only while this screen is open. Nothing is recorded, saved or sent — the sound is analyzed completely on the phone.

READ IT A real notation view: noteheads, stems, beams, cross noteheads for cymbals, stems up for hands and down for feet. The grid is for writing; the staff is for reading while you play.

KEEP IT Save grooves to a library on the phone, with search, tags and favorites. Send a groove to another drummer as a link they can open straight into Tating, and open the links they send you. Import MIDI on the standard drum map, and export it with the unlock so grooves move out to a DAW.

MAKE IT YOURS Point any drum at a recording of your own kit. Light or dark, and a choice of accent colors.

FREE AND PAID The free version is a complete tool. Every meter, every grid, playback, the click, the count-in, the play-along mutes and the notation view all work without paying, and so do all forty standard rudiments. What the free version limits is how much you can keep — ten saved grooves — and PocketCheck, which is free for five takes so you can hear it work before deciding.

One purchase unlocks everything, once, with no subscription:

• An unlimited library, with folders
• The full starter library — grooves, fills, exercises and the hybrid rudiments
• PocketCheck with no take limit
• Export sheet music as a PDF, a picture for a chat, or a MIDI file for a DAW
• Every color theme