Feature

BPM tracker: see your guitar progress in numbers

The feeling of progress is misleading: on a good day everything feels easy, on a bad one everything feels lost. The BPM tracker replaces that impression with an objective record of your tempos, exercise by exercise.

Why track your tempos

The clean tempo you can hold on an exercise is one of the simplest and most honest measures of your technique. Writing it down once doesn’t tell you much; logging it every session reveals a trend.

With a history, you know whether an exercise is moving up, plateauing or slipping. You also know which exercises deserve your time this week, instead of replaying the ones you’ve already mastered.

How it works in RIFFLEX

Every exercise is played with the built-in metronome. The tempo you reach is saved with the session, with no spreadsheet to fill in by hand.

Your progress curves are shown over 30, 90 and 365 days. The short view shows the effect of your week of practice; the long view shows whether your technique is really improving over time.

Metronome settings: beep, wood, rimshot or pendulum sound, start BPM at 213, custom increment of 10, 5 passes before each increment, count-in between loops and loop repeat. — The metronome settings: you pick the starting tempo and how it rises, RIFFLEX does the rest.
Metronome sound
The click sound: beep, wood, rimshot or pendulum.
Start BPM
The starting tempo, with the − and + buttons, the mouse wheel or by turning the knob.
Increment
How much the tempo goes up at each step: none, +1, +4, +8 or a custom value.
Passes before increment
How many times you play the exercise before the tempo goes up.
Count-in between loops
Plays a bar of clicks between two passes, to give you a breather.
Loop the exercise
Chains the passes without stopping: the tempo rises on its own.

What the curves tell you

Your strengths: the exercises where your speed climbs steadily.
Your ceilings: the exercises where the tempo stalls despite the work, often the sign of a specific block worth diagnosing.
The effect of consistency: progress that lasts shows up on the 90-day curve, not in a single session.

Performance goal: target slider at 130 BPM, one line per rhythm with the average BPM reached, two rhythms validated, max performance of 26 notes per second. — The performance goal: your average tempos per rhythm type, compared with the tempo you’re aiming for.
Target BPM
The tempo you’re aiming for, set with the slider.
One line per rhythm
Your average BPM in eighths, sixteenths, triplets, quintuplets… against the target.
In progress / Validated
A line turns green as soon as your average goes past the target.
Max performance
Your record turned into notes per second, to compare different rhythms.