Questions & answers

A practice companion for George Lawrence Stone's Stick Control. It gives every exercise in the book a metronome that clicks the exercise's own rhythm, counts your repetitions for you, and remembers where you got to. All 867 exercises from pages 5–46 are here, across 15 sections.

No — every sticking pattern is in the app, so you can practice without the book in front of you. Owning it is still worth it: Stone's own text, the fingering and grip notes, and the pages this site deliberately does not reproduce. StickTempo is an independent practice tool and is not affiliated with the book's publisher.

No. There are no accounts, no sign-in and no server. Your progress is saved in your browser on the device you practise on.

Open the Course and press Continue practice. It opens the first exercise of the first lesson at that section's suggested tempo with a click on every note. Press Start, play the pattern until the counter reaches 20, then move to the next exercise in the lesson. Three exercises is one lesson, which is roughly a 20–30 minute sitting.

One lesson a day is the design: three exercises, about 20–30 minutes including the repeats at both stages. Stone's own advice is to work a page until it is comfortable rather than to rush the book.

The Course is the book in order, chunked into 289 lessons of about three exercises each, with a Continue card that resumes where you left off. Exercises is the full library of all 867 patterns, filterable by book page, if you would rather pick one yourself. Nothing is locked in either — both play the same exercises.

A normal metronome clicks the beat and leaves the subdivision to you. This one follows the exercise: where a beat holds two notes you get two clicks, where the next beat holds three you get three, in the same bar. That is the point of the app — the click grid is the rhythm you are trying to play, so you cannot drift inside a beat without hearing it.

Stage 1 clicks every note in the pattern, so each stroke has a click to land on. Stage 2 clicks only the pulse and leaves the subdivisions to you. Learn a pattern at Stage 1, then prove it at Stage 2 — that removal of support is where the timing actually gets built. An exercise counts as done once you have completed both.

A plain metronome for the same pattern at 1, 2, 3 or 4 clicks per beat, for when you want a density the two stages do not give you. Free runs are not counted towards completing an exercise.

At Stage 1 the click is a grid of time, not a cue to hit something. Rests and the gaps inside dotted figures still get their click, which is exactly what keeps you from shortening them. Stage 2 drops back to the pulse.

Yes — one measure of pulse clicks before each run, so you start with the tempo already in your body. You can turn it off in Settings.

Yes. Accent beat 1 in Settings puts a distinct low click on the downbeat. There are three click voices in all: the downbeat accent, the pulse, and the subdivision clicks between them.

By the pulse the music actually moves in, not the time signature's bottom number. The 6/8 sections pulse in dotted quarters, two to a bar. Combinations in 3/8 and Combinations in 2/4 pulse in eighths, because that is how those pages are counted. The tempo you set is always the pulse tempo.

It is Stone's own instruction: play each rhythm twenty times without stopping before going on. The app counts them so you do not have to — counting reps in your head is exactly the attention the pattern needs.

Yes. The Reps slider on the practice screen sets the count for that run, and the ∞ button runs until you stop it. To change the number you start with everywhere, set Default reps in Settings.

Each section carries a suggested starting tempo, shown on every exercise page — 60 BPM for Single Beat Combinations, slower for flams and closed rolls, faster for the 3/8 and 2/4 pages that pulse in eighths. Stone prints no metronome marks, so these are conventions, not rules. Start where the pattern is clean and unhurried.

An opt-in way to move your tempo up on evidence instead of on a timer. After each run you rate it Clean, Shaky or Lost it. Clean moves the tempo up about 3%, Shaky repeats the same tempo, and Lost it drops it about 6%. Two bad runs end the session — the point is to stop before you practise the mistake.

The tempo the app believes you own for that exercise. It only moves up after a second clean run at the same tempo, and by at most 10% in one session, so a single lucky run does not promote you. New sessions start one step below the anchor as a warm-up.

Each section has a soft ceiling — the tempo past which that material stops paying off for most players. The ladder pauses there and asks before going higher rather than ramping silently. There is also a hard cap of 240 BPM.

No, it is off by default. Without it the tempo stays exactly where you set it and no rating is asked for. Turn it on per exercise, or for everything under Practice in Settings.

When you have completed a full run at Stage 1 and a full run at Stage 2. Runs you stop early do not count, and Free-mode runs never count. You can also mark any exercise done by hand.

It marks the lesson and all the exercises inside it as complete, so the course, the library and the lesson's own list all agree. Un-marking clears that, but an exercise you genuinely practised through both stages stays done.

Yes — inside a part nothing is locked. The Continue card follows the furthest lesson you have completed, so jumping forward moves you forward; a lesson you skipped stays open in the list for whenever you want it.

Stone's order — the 289 lessons walk pages 5 to 46 in the sequence the book prints them, three exercises at a time, and lessons never straddle two sections.

Because the book splits itself there. Stone closes two of his units with a printed review — Review of Short Roll Combinations on p.13, and Review of Short Rolls in 6/8 on pp.28–29 — so those are the boundaries: Part 1 is pp.5–13 (the strokes themselves), Part 2 is pp.14–29 (flams, and rolls in compound time), Part 3 is pp.30–46 (3/8, 2/4, dotted figures and the roll progressions). Each part ends on a page the author wrote to consolidate it. Inside a part nothing is locked: every lesson and exercise is available from the start, in any order.

At one lesson a day — three exercises, twenty repetitions each, at both stages — the 289 lessons work out at roughly ten months. That matches what players who finish it report, and it is the pace the parts are sized for. Nothing stops you going faster or slower; the app only tracks what you have actually completed.

Settings → Manage progress opens a tree of every section, lesson and exercise with checkboxes, so you can reset one exercise, a lesson, a whole section, or any mix. There is a separate full reset that asks you to type a confirmation. Resets deliberately keep your tempo memory — you should not have to rediscover a tempo you already earned.

No. It is stored in the browser you practised in, so a phone and a laptop keep separate progress, and clearing that browser's site data erases it.

All of the sticking material: 867 exercises across 15 sections, pages 5 to 46, including the flam pages, the closed-roll pages, the 6/8 and 3/8 and 2/4 sections and the roll progressions.

Single Beat Combinations (pp.5–7, 72 exercises); Triplets (pp.8–9, 33 exercises); Short Roll Combinations (Single Beat Rolls) (p.10, 24 exercises); Short Roll Combinations (Double Beat Rolls) (p.11, 24 exercises); Short Roll Combinations (Closed Rolls) (p.12, 24 exercises); Review of Short Roll Combinations (p.13, 12 exercises); Short Rolls and Triplets (pp.14–15, 48 exercises); Flam Beats (pp.16–23, 192 exercises); Short Rolls in 6/8 (pp.24–27, 96 exercises); Review of Short Rolls in 6/8 (pp.28–29, 24 exercises); Combinations in 3/8 (pp.30–32, 72 exercises); Combinations in 2/4 (p.33, 24 exercises); Flam Triplets and Dotted Notes (pp.34–37, 54 exercises); Short Roll Progressions (pp.38–42, 132 exercises); Short Roll Progressions and Triplets (pp.44–46, 36 exercises).

Because the book numbers them that way. Several sections restart at №1 on every page, so an exercise is only identified by its page and number together — which is why those pages show the number as, for example, p.24 №7.

As they are played. A flam shows its grace note against the main stroke; a closed roll shows the sustained note with the sticking the book prints beneath it, and ties where the roll carries into the next stroke. Open-roll pages are written out stroke by stroke, because that is how Stone writes them.

The same pattern with the hands swapped — Stone pairs most exercises so the weaker hand leads the same figure. Practising both sides of a pair is the point of the pairing.

Where a companion recording exists, the exercise page links to it and jumps to the right moment in the video. The recordings come from the DDrummer project's Stick Control playlist on YouTube and cover book pages 5 to 42.

Browsers block audio until you interact with the page, and pressing Start is that interaction, so it should sound on the first press. If it does not: check the click volume in Settings, check that the tab is not muted, and on an iPhone check the physical silent switch, which mutes web audio.

Yes, it is built for a phone propped on a practice pad as much as for a laptop. Keep the screen awake — if the device sleeps, the click stops with it.

Yes. The metronome is scheduled ahead of time rather than by the browser's timer, so it keeps accurate time in a background tab. It cannot survive the device going to sleep.

Not yet. The pages you have already opened may come back from your browser's cache, but there is no offline mode you can rely on.

No. There is no microphone or MIDI input, and nothing you play is recorded or analysed. It clicks, counts and remembers — the judgement of whether a run was clean is yours.

Your practice data — every exercise you have done, your tempos, your history — is stored in your own browser and is never sent anywhere. Separately, the site uses Google Analytics to count anonymous usage: which pages are opened, which exercises get practised, whether runs are finished. You are asked once, and if you decline, no cookie is set and no identifier is stored. There is no account, no advertising, and nothing that identifies you.

Choose Decline on the banner the first time you visit. If you already accepted and want to change your mind, clear this site's data in your browser and choose Decline when asked again. A browser sending a Global Privacy Control signal is opted out automatically and never sees the banner. Declining changes nothing about how the app works.

Yes, all of it, with nothing held back behind a sign-up.