FillIQ

You’ve learnt the licks.They still don’t connect.

The fill goes exactly as planned. Then beat one arrives late, the hi-hat feel has shifted, and it takes a bar and a half to settle. The chops were never the issue. The landing was.

FillIQ scores where you land. Every hit is measured against the click to the millisecond, so the join stops being a feeling you argue about and becomes a number you can move.

Get FillIQ — $97 once

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FillIQ item

Level 41 · Item 7

gFloor

>Tom 1

>Snare

gSnare

Kick

90 BPMGroups of 52 accents

Eight clean bars of this at 80% and the item is passed. One bar under the line and the count starts again.

The honest diagnosis

Fills get practised on their own. The join gets practised by accident.

Chops get their own hour. What happens either side of them — the part every listener actually hears — gets whatever is left. Here is what that produces.

The fill arrives and the time leaves

You play the fill you meant to play. Then you land half a beat late, the hi-hat has changed feel, and it takes a bar and a half to settle again.

You have four fills and you play all four every time

Not because you like them. Because they are the only ones you trust to come back from. The rest stay in the practice room.

You sound worse with other people than alone

Alone, you set the tempo and nothing argues. In a room, the pulse has to survive a guitarist, a click that drops out, and a section you half remember.

You practise, and nothing measurable changes

An hour on the kit feels productive. Six months later you are playing the same things at the same tempo, and you could not say which part actually improved.

None of this is a talent problem. It is a measurement problem. You cannot fix a landing you have never measured.

FillIQ

What it measures

You are scored against the click and against where you land. Not against your own sense of whether it went well. Two numbers make up every bar.

Where you land

Full marks inside 100ms of the written position. From there the score falls away to nothing by 400ms. Past 300ms a hit is not late — it is a miss.

What you played

Notes are weighted by what they carry. An accented snare counts 1.5, the bass/kick 1.2, hi-hat and ride 1.0, ghost notes and toms 0.8. Right rhythm on the wrong drum costs a little over half a miss.

The split

Sixty per cent of a bar is the notes, forty per cent is the placement. Extra hits you did not owe are shown back to you but never subtract.

Your latency, not your playing

Kit and interface delay is measured once and taken off before anything is scored, so the number reflects your hands.

What a pass takes

A bar passes at 80%. An item passes when the last eight bars all pass — one bar below the line restarts the count. It is a test of holding a standard, not of catching one good take.

One thing at a time

The ladder

Every item is a fully specified exercise: an exact tempo, a sticking, a voice for each step, and whichever demands the level has switched on. Items get harder one parameter at a time, so when something breaks you know which thing broke it.

Tempo

The same sticking comes back faster. Nothing else moves, so speed is isolated.

40 BPM up to 200 BPM, depending on the grouping

Sticking

Singles and doubles first, then the bass/kick enters the phrase, then five-note phrases that do not fit the bar neatly.

RLRL through to five-note phrases with double kicks

Grouping

The phrase is played against a different grouping than it is written in, so it rotates against the pulse instead of lining up.

4-in-3, 3-in-4, 5-in-3, 5-in-4

Voices

The phrase moves off the snare and around the kit. Which drum each step lands on is specified, not left to you.

Snare, then floor tom, tom 1, crash, then a bass/kick layer under the hands

Accents

Accents switch on at a fixed position and rotate through the phrase. Everything unaccented becomes a ghost note. This is where control stops being a word and starts being a number.

None, then one accent, then two, then three

Coordination

The left foot joins on the hi-hat at a fixed interval while the hands keep the phrase.

Off, then at each grouping start, then every four sixteenths, then every three

The same idea, four rungs apart

Level 1

RLRL

40 BPM
Groups of 4
Snare only
No accents

Level 2

RKRK

40 BPM
Groups of 4
Snare + bass/kick
No accents

Level 19

RLRL

40 BPM
Groups of 4
Snare + floor tom

Higher levels

RRLLK

Faster tempo band
5-in-3 grouping
Around the kit
Accents on
Left foot on the hi-hat

Levels unlock in order. You do not move on until every item in the level is passed, so the ladder cannot be skipped at the point it starts to cost you something.

Scale

It does not run out

100

levels

2,470

individual items

parameters that escalate

Each item is its own exercise with its own tempo, sticking and demands, and each is tracked separately. Ten in the first level, then fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five in every level after that. Worked at a handful of items a session, this is years of material, and the ladder keeps climbing after the point most fill practice stops.

Before you buy

Do I need an electronic kit?

For the scoring, yes. Here is exactly what each mode needs and exactly what it gives you.

MIDI mode

What it needs

An electronic kit or pad sending MIDI, and Chrome, Edge, Opera or Firefox. Safari does not support Web MIDI on Mac or iPhone.

What it gives you

Every hit measured: the drum, the placement to the millisecond, and how hard you struck it. This is the mode everything on this page describes.

Acoustic mode

What it needs

Nothing. Any kit, any browser, no hardware.

What it gives you

The same 2,470 items, the click, the notation and the progression — played through and marked off by you. Nothing is detected and nothing is scored.

Acoustic mode is an honest way to work the ladder without an electronic kit. It is not measurement, and it is not presented as measurement anywhere in the app.

The price

Pay once. Keep it.

The ladder is 2,470 items deep. Pay once and work it at whatever pace the kit allows, with no clock running against you.

$97once

All 100 levels and 2,470 items
Scoring against the click in MIDI mode
Acoustic mode with no hardware needed
Progress saved to your account

Not ready to pay once? .

The fill was never the hard part.

Coming back is. Beat one either arrives where it should or it does not, and until something measures that, you are guessing. FillIQ measures it, one item at a time, for as long as you want to keep climbing.

Get FillIQ — $97 once