Support

What is Groove Shed? It’s a practice tool built around two main ideas: make it as easy and quick as possible to record your groove and timing-related practice, and make it equally easy and quick to learn from the recordings you make.

At the heart of the app is the rhythm engine. It listens to you play and plots every note on a timeline, showing you when you played center time, when you played ahead or behind, and by how much. The purpose isn’t to tell you what’s right or wrong, but to show you where your timing actually lands. For some music you want to be dead-center. Sometimes you want to sit consistently a little laid-back. Other times you need to drive, just a tad ahead of center time. Whatever time-feel you’re working on, Groove Shed lets you practice it with the help of data. Listening to your takes is still important, but listening with data helps you learn a lot quicker where you want to improve, and how.

Three things will help you get the most out of Groove Shed:

1. Subdivision setting. This controls the click editing grid, but more importantly, it also controls what the timing analysis listens to. Set it to 1 and the analyzer listens only around the main beats, ignoring subdivisions. Set it to 2, 3, or 4 and you’ll get feedback on your 8th notes, triplets, or 16th notes too.
2. Project folders. Create a folder for each thing you’re working on, then record every take of that same thing into the same folder. This way you can compare your performance on that thing over time. In data terms, you’re comparing apples to apples.
3. Use wired headphones. Not everyone has headphones they can plug directly into their phone these days, and that’s fine. But if your click or loop feeds straight into the device’s microphone, it skews the analysis. Headphones make sure the app only hears you play, so the analysis stays reliable.

Groove Shed also includes a powerful programmable 4-track sequencer and a big library of life-like drum and percussion loops. They’re there to give you plenty of different rhythmic references to play and practice with. And if the library doesn’t have something you need, the click editor lets you build it yourself.

Enough reading, let the shedding begin.

Before you read any further, let’s get one thing straight. The purpose of the analysis is not to tell you what’s right or wrong, or to label things good or bad. Being 100% center time is only good if you want to sound like a computer. The purpose is to let you study your own playing and different time feels, and to deliberately practice how you position yourself relative to the beat.

Time feel can be measured, which is what Groove Shed does for you. For musicians, talking about milliseconds won’t mean much at first. This article walks you through all that, and you’ll learn how to interpret the results you get.

Before you record

Groove Shed will measure what you tell it to listen to. You control this by adjusting the subdivision and swing settings. If you set subdivision to 1, only what you play around the main beats is analyzed; anything you play between the beats is ignored completely. Setting it to 2, 3, or 4 tells Groove Shed to also listen to what happens between the beats. The swing dial then gives you total control over how those subdivisions groove, and the analysis compares your playing against those settings.

Two modes

Analysis has two modes, Basic and Advanced.

Basic mode looks at the big picture of your time feel. It shows whether you’re able to consistently play around center time, or whether you tend to land clearly off to one side, ahead or behind. This is perfect when you’re still building the foundation of your timing skills and a detailed analysis doesn’t yet make sense.

Advanced mode zooms in. It’s built to measure and practice the fine nuances of time feel.

Two different angles on your timing

The analysis page gives you two diagrams. A histogram shows your overall timing, where you land in the big picture. A beat-by-beat diagram reveals where you land across different beats and subdivisions. The former shows your main tendency. The latter connects to the material you’re practicing and points more specifically to where you’re playing the way you want, and where you’re not.

The millisecond game

Let’s take a look at the numbers. This is all very instrument-specific. Different instruments are not comparable, so guitarists shouldn’t compare their results to drummers or horn players. Different types of music have different aesthetics too, so you shouldn’t compare EDM to samba.

Here are some benchmarks. These are all averages, but they’ll give you a good idea:

• The limit of human perception for timing sits around 5ms. If two musical sounds happen less than 5ms apart, they’re perceived as happening at exactly the same time. In a lab with two identical sounds and no musical context we can hear even smaller differences, but in a musical context with different instruments playing together, nobody hears the difference between an offset of 2 or 4 milliseconds.
• The most precise human drummers can play consistently inside a ±10ms window on a repetitive groove. In simple terms, every hit is no more than 10ms off to either side of where they wanted it.
• For other rhythm section instruments, a consistency of around ±15ms generally sounds tight, and numbers below ±10ms can be reached with fairly simple, repetitive rhythms.
• Playing around 10–20ms ahead of center time creates a driving feel. It’s not rushing yet, just pushy and energetic. 30ms or more will generally sound like rushing.
• Playing around 10–20ms behind center time generally sounds laid-back or relaxed. 30ms or more starts to feel like you’re dragging and no longer with everyone else.

The window sizes are tuned to all of this. If you’re ahead or behind in Basic mode, you’re clearly rushing or dragging. In Advanced mode, one step away from center time gives you a driving or laid-back feel; two steps away and you’re in rushing or dragging territory.

What the analysis window means

There’s one more thing to know about the analysis windows. Groove Shed won’t listen to or analyze notes you play outside of the analysis window. In practical terms, if you set your subdivision to 2 (think eighth notes), the analysis won’t care about the space exactly between those eighth notes. This is intentional: it removes unnecessary noise and focuses only on the notes you’re intentionally trying to play on the grid. The microphone hears every sound you make, not only the ones you intend to play, so this also filters out collateral sounds and makes your analysis more reliable.

Average offset and consistency

On top of the diagrams, analysis gives you two numbers.

Average offset tells you where the center of all your recorded notes sits. Relative to center time, an average offset inside ±5ms is beyond human perception and will be experienced as dead on.

Consistency tells you how widely your notes are spread. It ignores clear outliers as brainfarts and focuses on the majority of the notes you play. Consistency under ±10ms is very tight, something good professional drummers are capable of. Around ±30ms is a bit here and there, and anything clearly more than ±40ms will sound like you’re a bit all over the place.

Reading your results in context

The final, and maybe most important, thing about reading your analysis results is that it’s always relative to what you play. If you practice things that are at the edge of your current ability, you’ll see a very different reading than when playing things that are easy for you. The more repetitive the material, the tighter your readings will be, and vice versa.

In practice this means you should always compare apples to apples. Use project folders, and only record the same or a very similar thing into one folder. When you do, the folder becomes your practice journal for that specific thing, and comparing your earlier results to your later ones makes sense and shows you how you’re progressing. If you record easy stuff and really hard stuff next to each other, the analysis will only tell you the obvious: easy stuff is easier than hard stuff.

We suggest you create a lot of project folders and title them so you remember exactly what you’re practicing inside each one. That’s how you unlock the full potential of the Groove Shed analysis.

Groove Shed is designed to give you a quick, no-hassle recording experience with whatever gear you have. Here’s how to get the best out of each setup.

Wired headphones

Wired headphones give you ultra-low latency and the most reliable analysis out of the box. No calibration needed. The catch is that most iPhones and iPads haven’t had a headphone jack for a while, so depending on your device you’ll need a small adapter.

• USB-C port (iPhone 15 and later, most iPads from 2022 onwards) — any USB-C to headphone jack adapter, or a USB dongle. USB-C earbuds also work, though they tend to be more expensive.
• Lightning port (iPhone 14 and earlier, older iPads) — any Lightning to headphone jack adapter.
• Older iPads with a built-in headphone jack (some pre-2022 models) — plug straight in. We haven’t fully tested this combination yet, but it should work.

Bluetooth headphones

For using Groove Shed as a click sequencer and loop player, without recording, any Bluetooth gear works perfectly. For highly accurate recording and analysis, no Bluetooth gear can get you to Advanced analysis level.

For Basic analysis and good click/recording sync, AirPods work best — low latency and very little drift, so Apple’s gear is generally reliable for recording against a click and getting good-quality Basic analysis. Other brands and models vary a lot depending on the quality of their components. Our calibration can make better-quality units work pretty well, but don’t expect pro-level recording sync. Calibrate your headphones once in Settings and the app takes care of the rest.

No headphones

For using Groove Shed as a click sequencer and loop player, no headphones works perfectly too. The same goes for recording and listening back to yourself playing with a click or loop: it’s only the analysis that’s limited when you’re not using headphones.

That limit comes down to the phone speaker playing the click or loop into the room, with the microphone picking it up alongside your playing. The app can clean a click out of the audio well enough to give you Basic analysis. Drum loops are too busy for reliable stem separation, so analysis is disabled in the loops-plus-no-headphones scenario.

One thing to know: count-in is off by default. If you record without headphones and count-in is off, Groove Shed needs it on to run Basic analysis, and will ask whether to turn it on, record anyway without analysis, or cancel. It remembers your choice after that, so you won’t see the prompt again.

Audio interfaces

USB audio interfaces generally work with Groove Shed. We haven’t put them through extensive testing yet, so consider this an early read rather than a full guide. We’re testing audio interfaces more thoroughly and will expand this section with more detail as that work progresses.