Rhythm Tap

Notes fall down four or six lanes. Tap each one as it reaches the line — with the screen, the mouse, or its key. Twelve original tracks, a daily, and a groove that never repeats.

Score0Combo0Best run0Ready

Four lanes, one note to a beat, and the widest timing windows. Nothing here needs a second finger.

Sound starts when you press Start — browsers require that. The game is fully playable without it.

How to play

Press Start. After a four-beat count-in the notes begin falling. Tap a lane at the moment its note reaches the line at the bottom: the closer you are, the more it is worth — Perfect, Great, Good, or a Miss if it goes past.

Ten notes in a row doubles what the next ones are worth, twenty triples it, thirty is the cap at four times. A miss resets it. The cap is there on purpose: without one, the last quarter of a track would be worth more than all the rest of it together and a single early miss would be unrecoverable.

On a keyboard, six lanes are A S D J K L, and four lanes use the inner four — two fingers on each hand either way. Holding a key counts as one tap.

Two rules worth knowing before you start

A run does not survive a reload. Reloading starts fresh rather than picking up where you were. Otherwise reloading would be a way out of a passage you were fluffing. Settings, calibration and finished runs are all kept.

A run that loses time is not kept as a best. If the tab is hidden or the page stalls for more than a second, the music carries on and notes genuinely go past. The run finishes and you see the whole result — it simply does not become a best, and the game tells you while it is happening.

Modes

Beginner: Four lanes, one note to a beat, and the widest timing windows. Nothing here needs a second finger.
Standard: Four or six lanes with sixteenth-note runs and syncopation, judged on windows about a third tighter than Beginner's.
Expert: Six lanes, three-note chords and a triplet groove, on the tightest windows in the game.
Daily Track: One chart chosen by today's UTC date, the same for everyone, with a groove generated from the same seed. Yesterday's is gone.
Endless Groove: A groove generated bar by bar that never repeats and never ends, getting a little denser the longer you hold the combo.

The tracks

Twelve, all written for this route, across three bands. Each one names its tempo and how it divides the beat; one of them divides it in thirds rather than halves, which is a genuinely different thing to play rather than a faster version of the same thing.

beginner

First Steps — 90 bpm, 4 lanes, eighths, 43s
Two Lanterns — 100 bpm, 4 lanes, eighths, 38s
Slow Tide — 84 bpm, 4 lanes, eighths, 46s
Paper Kites — 96 bpm, 4 lanes, eighths, 40s

standard

Copper Wire — 112 bpm, 4 lanes, sixteenths, 30s
Night Bus — 124 bpm, 4 lanes, sixteenths, 27s
Lantern Run — 118 bpm, 6 lanes, eighths, 33s
Glass Rain — 130 bpm, 6 lanes, eighths, 30s

expert

Ironwork — 140 bpm, 6 lanes, sixteenths, 27s
Static Bloom — 150 bpm, 6 lanes, sixteenths, 26s
Nine Volt — 158 bpm, 6 lanes, triplets, 24s
Terminal Velocity — 165 bpm, 6 lanes, sixteenths, 23s

Calibration

Some devices play sound noticeably after they say they do, and most people have a small steady bias of their own. The calibration screen plays eight clicks, you tap along, and it takes the middle value of what you did — the middle rather than the average, because one tap that lands on the wrong beat would drag an average of eight by more than a tenth of a second. The result is subtracted from every tap from then on; nothing on screen moves. You can set it back to zero at any time, and most setups on laptop speakers measure close enough to nothing that it makes no difference.

Tips

Watch the line, not the notes. Reading a note the whole way down makes you tap where it is rather than where the beat is.
If the results screen says you are consistently early or late by the same amount, that is the calibration screen's job rather than something to correct by hand.
A miss costs the combo but nothing else. Recovering the beat immediately is worth far more than trying to catch the note you have already lost.
Sound off is a real way to play — every verdict is on screen in words — but the drums make the beat much easier to hold.

Privacy and local play

Everything runs in your browser. Your bests, your daily results, your settings and your calibration are kept in this browser's local storage and are never sent anywhere — there is no account, no server and no leaderboard. The music is synthesised on your own device rather than downloaded. Clearing this game's data from the panel above removes all of it, including the calibration, and touches nothing else on Zerdly.

Frequently asked questions

I reloaded the page and lost my run. Is that a bug?: No — it is deliberate, and it is the only rule here that costs you anything. A run that survived a reload would make reloading a way out of a passage you were fluffing, so reloading starts fresh instead. Your settings, your calibration and every finished run are kept.
My score was good but it was not saved as a best. Why?: Because the page lost more than a second somewhere — usually the tab was hidden, or the device was busy. The music carries on when a tab is hidden, so notes really do go past, and a run that had a gap in it cannot fairly be compared with one that did not. The game says so on screen while it is happening rather than springing it on you at the end, and you still see the full result.
Everything feels late. What do I do?: Open Calibrate and tap along with eight clicks. Some devices play sound after they say they do — Bluetooth headphones are routinely a tenth of a second out — and most people have their own steady habit of being a shade early or late. The test measures the two together and takes the total off every tap afterwards. It does not move anything on screen, because the picture was never the thing that was wrong.
Two notes were close together in one lane and I only got one of them.: A tap takes the EARLIEST note still live in that lane, not the nearest one. It looks backwards and it is not: if a tap took the nearest note, being slightly late on one note would take the next one instead, strand the first, and leave you a tap behind for the rest of the phrase. Tapping a lane twice means the next two notes in it.
I tapped a lane with nothing in it and nothing happened.: That is right — a tap on an empty lane costs nothing at all. On a touch screen a stray tap is as often the hardware as the player, and a game that punished it would teach you to play timidly. Letting a note go past still costs you the combo.
Where does the music come from?: It is all synthesised in your browser by this page — a few hundred milliseconds of tones and filtered noise per sound, and the drums and bass are built from whatever tempo and meter the track declares. Nothing is sampled or borrowed, and all twelve tracks were written for this route.
Why is there no leaderboard?: There is no server and no account, so there is nobody to compare you with. Your bests live in this browser and nowhere else. We would rather show you your own best on a track than invent a rank.