Bounce Metronome Pro
It has Swing, and Rhythm :-) And your own Software Conductor!

What is special about this metronome software?

Intro - Main Features - Gravity Bounce - Why do these visuals work so well? - For blind - For deaf - Harmonic - Melodic - Feature Comparison - Swing? - Lilt - Links

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This metronome has everything you need in a metronome such as time signatures, subdivisions, tempo dial etc. It also has polyrhythms, swing and other rarely found features.

However what makes it unique is it's conductor's baton, bouncing ball or drum stick visuals. They make an astonishing difference to the practice session, as your very own personal conductor to help you to play exactly on the beat every time.

You get a free 30 day Test drive - with all the features fully unlocked

What a difference it makes! You need to download the metronome to hear the sound. Also the downloaded metronome plays the rhythm smoothly without the glitches you may get in this flash movie. It's just to give a first impression of what it's like. It's extremely user friendly. FALL PROMOTION Enter FALL as the coupon on the third page of the checkout for a 40% discount - you can also use AUTUMN Buy now There's a Money back guarantee

Main Features skip- skip back Software Conductor, drum sticks and bouncing ball to mark the start of each beat crisply and in time with the sound. Conducting patterns, and other bounce patterns to help you hit the beat with precision Set any Tempo with the handy dial. Any time signatures including odd time signatures Beat subdivisions Play the bar beats, beats and subdivisions with different instrument sounds Accent beats or skip beats Swing Or steady tick Drum and dance rhythms Syncopation Any tempo including fractions of a BPM. Gradual changes of tempo Polyrhythms (cross rhythms). Additive rhythms and rhythm cycles Adjust individual beat volumes and times. Harmonic metronomes and fractal tunes and version of Theremin's Rhythmicon Song Car Tunes ball bouncing on lyrics Many more features With the separate metronomes easily selected from a drop list, this software can adapt to your specialist needs. Some use it for Polyrhythms, Swing, Drum or Dance rhythms, Additive rhythms or hythm cycles, for a feature rich Pro metronome, or for a basic time signature metronome - amongst the many possibilities.

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"You can use it with the sound switched off, as a silent metronome."

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Gravity Bounce

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The innovative gravity bounce helps you to play exactly on the beat. This is especially useful when you are learning a rhythm with irregular beat patterns.

"It's like having your own conductor to help you keep in time"

(silent animation - the software can play all these animations with sound)
Note. If this animation has timing glitches, be reassured,
the program itself doesn't have these issues. For details see Animation glitches.

For more animations of the gravity bounce, see Watch the Gravity Bounce Visuals

You get a free 30 day Test drive - with all the features fully unlocked. To get the program go here :

To find out about it's other features see Details and Features. If you have already downloaded it and wish to purchase, see Purchase. Note that there is a Money Back Guarantee if you purchase it and then find it isn't suitable for your needs.

To find out more about how this innovation is possible, and its background, read on.

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Why do these visuals work so well?

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It is easy and natural to anticipate the moment when a bouncing ball will hit the ground - so that you can sing, play or clap exactly in time with it.

This technique was used in the "Car tunes" movies towards the end of the silent movies era and for the first movies with sound. The ball bouncing on the lyrics helped the audience to sing along with the movie. Bounce Metronome now has a separate "Car Tunes" metronome. The shadow below helps to make the moment of the bounce itself easier to see:

As you see it in the program itself, this time for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

There's an animation of this here: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star - Sound Car Tune

Conductors also use the same technique - they will often bounce the baton off an "invisible plane" which makes it easy for the orchestra to anticipate the exact moment of the beat so that they can play along in time.

"The motion is like bouncing a golf ball on pavement. Your performers must be trained to play exactly at the bottom of the beat."
P 19, Brock McElheran, "Conducting Technique for beginners and professionals", revised edition (1989).

Indeed, you can use this metronome purely visually even without the tick and still play exactly on the beat even for irregular rhythms such as swing. You can switch off the sound for Bounce Metronome and use it for practice as a silent metronome.

With this innovation, the visuals become primary, and it becomes much easier to practise rhythms with swing and irregular beats as you can anticipate the exact moment of an irregular beat visually. The drum stick or conductor's baton visuals let you do this.

That's why it is so suitable for rhythms with swing and irregular beats. It is like having your own personal conductor to help you keep in time.

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Accessibility for blind musicians

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For blind users and those who don't work visually very much, there is an alternative interface designed for you -you can play all the same rhythms as a sighted user. You can use all the features - except for the bouncing ball visuals of course - and an option to get beats from a groove via clicks on the visual display of the waveform. Everything else is accessible through your screen reader.

For more about this, see the Blind Musician's Metronome page.

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Accessibility for deaf musicians

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Since the metronome can be used entirely visually, as a silent metronome, it may also be of interest to deaf musicians too. There is no need to be able to hear the sound to play in time with the metronome.

For more animations go here: see Watch the Gravity Bounce Visuals . For those with visual impairment, the colours can be changed - the preset alternatives are black on white or white on black (automatically selected if you have chosen one of those already as your preference in the Accessibility settings for Windows), and you can also set the colours yourself.

The bouncing ball or conductor style baton bounce exactly in time with the rhythm beats. So you can use it as a silent and purely visual metronome.

You can also get a rhythm from a groove or tap out a rhythm yourself. The bounces will be synchronised exactly with those rhythms too.

For the details of the features available for deaf musicians, see Details and Features again.

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Harmonic features

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Here the idea is that each number of beats per bar is assigned a pitch, so e.g. 7 beats to the bar corresponds to the seventh harmonic, 5 beats to the bar corresponds to the fifth and so on.

The results sound harmoniously together as they use pitches from the harmonic series. You can shift all the notes into the same octave if desired (as harmonic series notes may be spread over several octaves).

You can also play Theremin's rhythmicon which generates interesting and harmonious polyrhyhmic pitched rhythms.

Then for something more exotic you can also try out the fractional beats per bar, including the golden ratio rhythm which combines the most polyrhythmic possible rhythm (in a certain sense) combined with the most inharmonic possible musical interval (actually a pleasant interval to listen to, just not related to any interval in the harmonic series).

To find out more see Harmonic, Fractional Harmonic, and Rhythmicon

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Melodic features

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You can make your rhythm into a random tune, e.g. for fun, to brighten up a practice session, as a

way to hear your rhythm played melodically, or as a basis for a new tune. You can also make the harmonious sounding polyrhythmic harmonic metronomes. These use the same idea as Theremin's Rhythmicon.

You can play any of the Midi melodic instruments on your soundcard or synth, and use them to play the tunes on the metronome. Or you can use the in-built wave shape player, or CSound Instruments.

You can use any tuning for your tune - including any SCALA scale, or .TUN tuning table - just as for the parent program Tune Smithy. However it doesn't have the full tune creating capabilities of Tune Smithy such as chord progressions and so on. For algo comp enthusiasts - note that to use your Bounce Metronome Pro tunes with Tune Smithy with the skipped beats and other new features you will need to wait for the release of FTS 3.1, projected to be some time in summer 2009.

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Feature Comparison Chart

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For a list of all the features available in Bounce Metronome Basic and in Bounce Metronome Pro and a feature comparison chart, see Details and Features.

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What is swing?

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Swung notes are a feature of many types of music. Notes are played alternately longer and shorter than usual though normally notated all the same length.

The amount of swing can be vary e.g. a light swing of 3:2 or a hard swing of 3:1 or a medium swing of 2:1 which corresponds to a triplet quarter note + triplet eighth note - but whatever the amount of swing, they would be notated as two notes of equal duration, e.g. both as eighth notes.

So it is a performance thing, and you can think of them as the same type of note, but played with swing so one is shorter than the other, rather than as e.g. triplets as such. For instance you might experiment with the same piece with different amounts of swing varying from equality all the way to a hard swing or further.

See Swung note (wikipedia)

As you see, types of music that use swung notes include jazz, Scottish or Irish traditional music, some dance and country music, and early music particularly France from the middle of the 16th century to late 18th century

For the early music use see notes inégal, also on the dolmetsch site, with precursors much earlier in the Ars Antiqua rhythmic modes:

You can make swung rhythms with a light, medium or hard swing, or any custom amount of swing with Bounce Metronome Pro.

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Gentle Lilt

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In nearly all types of music the beats in a bar are uneven in a subtle way. Musicians play like this even when they don't realise they are doing it - you notice it if you compare it with computer generated music with the notes all exactly the same length. Varying the beat with a gentle lilt makes the music much more natural sounding and it is likely to be easier to play along with.

If you find it hard to play your notes exactly in time with the beats of a metronome, but easy to play along with other musicians, it may well be because you are used to playing with a lilt and can't adjust your playing to its strict clock like beat. In that case it is better if you can adjust the metronome to play a lilt :-) (unless you need to play a clock-like strict beat for some reason for a particular piece say).

Bounce metronome Pro does the Lilt or swing with a natural decay, faster and lighter, like the bounces of a drumstick

When lilted or swung in pairs then the second beat is normally faster than the first in each pair.

When lilted in triplets or more than three notes, there are many choices you could make about how to do it. But one natural and straightforward way to do it is to make each beat faster than the previous one exactly in the way it happens with a bouncing ball or drumstick (exponential decay), followed by a very slightly longer beat to raise the drum stick before the next series of bounces. That's how it is done in bounce metronome Pro.

The automatic choice is to lilt in pairs, triplets, or more notes depends on the reinforced beats. However you can adjust this and choose any number of notes for the metrical pulse.

After you make the swung rhythm or lilted rhythm automatically, you can then adjust any of the beats individually with click and drag.

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Links

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For more about the bouncing balls in early movies, see Sound Car-tunes and Bouncing Ball. For swung rhythms, see Swung note (wikipedia)

Here is a useful Short History of the Metronome

To find other relevant material, try some of the top google searches related to this web site -see keywords.

Some top keyword searches particularly relevant to this page: rhythm, metronome, rhythms, metronomes, metronome download, metronome software, and metronome, tempo metronome, downloadable metronome (click on the link to search in Google).

For some of the other metronome software available, see the Metronomes section at HitSquad. For a collection of free on-line metronomes see the BestMetronome.com

I recently came across another software metronome with a bouncing ball display with the ball bouncing under simulated gravity, (there are many that have lights or a ball that move up and down at constant speed, but this is the only other one I know with a gravity bounce). See the Professional Metronome by Storm Software.

Here is a long list of some of the other on-line and Windows desktop metronomes. with some of the main features - free or shareware.

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