A Labour of Love

Keep Ya Beat has been in development for several years!

It began as a humble Java program which I intended to use a metronome that could simplify learning flamenco music, and realized that rhythms with complex structures, like half-beats and syncopation, were impossibly hard to follow using a traditional ticking metronome. I would play some flamenco rhythm with 12 beats in it, and even though it sounded right, I had a lot of difficulty when I didn't end up on the 12th beat at the end, maybe I was under or over. Playing and counting is very hard to do when you're learning! And I noticed that other people also go through a steep learning curve with new kinds of music.

So I decided to create a program that would help by ticking half-beats, and use different sounds for them. The first attempt wasn't very good, but I was hooked on the idea because it seemed like a really useful tool to have, if I could get it to work, and it shouldn't be that hard, right? The next try was to make a fully featured desktop application, but it was still quite clunky, and the timing of the playing rhythms wasn't good, it wasn't accurate enough. After quite a large development, I shelved it.

Then I started to get interested in programming games in Java, and along the way learned a lot of stuff I didn't know before ~ games techniques for accurate timing and better graphics. I realized these were the missing pieces I needed, not only to try again, but to make a really high-quality 'nome'. Using this new knowledge and some cutting edge technologies I was at last able to make a portable desktop program that would be simple to download and run on all platforms.

The Android version has been a long time coming. Originally I was hoping to port the desktop version to Android, but soon realized that wouldn't be the best way to go, better to have a dedicated version. There's been a steep learning curve as there are many particular issues when developing for a handheld device, but at last the first beta release and then the first official release are just around the corner.

Development will continue on the Android version, first to bring some portability to rhythms, so you can share them with friends and download them from this site. Your voice matters, if you want to see something added to Keep Ya Beat or to share your own rhythms, please get in touch!