Now, did you fall at first sight or did you need a shove?

I'm grateful to Greenleaf's Michael Bates for drawing my attention to practicesightreading.com, an incredibly cool random rhythm generator that supports multiple levels of complexity, and both single and mixed meters. As the name of the site suggests, it's intended to generate customized exercises for rhythmic sight-reading, but the compositional possibilities of a user-configurable random rhythm generator like this shouldn't be overlooked either.

My only quibbles so far is that it would be nice to be able to input any time sig instead of being limited to preset choices (also, I really want to turn off display of the metric subdivisions for 5/8 and 7/8), and everything is very downbeat-centric -- there are not nearly enough tied notes, even at the highest levels.

Comments

[Randy Wong]

1.

Thanks for posting this. I agree, there's a definite dearth of tied rhythms. Also, I wish there was a rubric posted of what qualities define each level (the Level Difficulty page is a good start, but it's not clear to me there's both a level 2 and 2.5, and then not much difference between level 3 and 4).

Something else that would be cool would be a feature that shows identical patterns in related meters. For example, the initial auto-generated rhythm in 3/4 could also be shown in 3/2, 9/8, etc. Proportional relationships like that can be a tongue twister in sight-reading too.

[Mark]

2.

Wish I had known about this while I was practicing sight reading all week for a VJO gig. This is pretty great and I'm sure with suggestions will only get better. Wish they had a percussion instrument instead of just pitched playalong.

[isaac]

3.

i also feel like everything (in 4/4 at least) ends in a whole note fourth measure.