The tortoise and the hare: are you rushing or dragging?

Drummers can spend years hearing the same piece of advice: “Watch your timing.”

Usually, it means that a hit didn’t land on the click. It came a little too early or a little too late.

The problem is that, from behind the kit, it can be hard to tell exactly what your timing is doing. You may hear that some hits aren’t quite lining up with the click, but it’s much harder to tell by how much, how often, and whether you tend to land early or late.

You may be convinced that you always rush or always fall behind. But that feeling is subjective, and it doesn’t always match what the data shows.

iQuantize analyzes each take and checks whether your playing tends to land ahead of or behind the click.

The hare means you’re rushing and landing ahead of the click:

The tortoise means you’re dragging and landing behind it:

The thresholds are clear and consistent throughout the app:

The calculation uses all hits that iQuantize was able to match to the written notes, including green, orange and red hits. Burgundy notes, which represent missed notes, aren’t included because there was no actual hit to measure.

There’s an important exception.

Latency in your audio setup can shift every detected hit in the same direction. That can make a drummer with accurate timing appear to be consistently ahead of or behind the click.

That’s why iQuantize won’t give you a rushing or dragging verdict until timing calibration has been run and applied to scoring. You can do both in Settings, under Timing Correction.

The 30-day timing tendency chart in Progress collects your rushing and dragging statistics over the last 30 days.

The chart shows one bar for each day with timing data. Blue bars above the center indicate rushing, which means you tended to play ahead of the click. Orange bars below the center indicate dragging, which means you tended to play behind the click. Green bars in the center mean you were on the beat.

Days without calibrated timing data aren’t included.

The accumulated picture answers a question that a single take can’t: which way do you actually tend to go?

One take tells you about one take. A month can tell you about a habit.

And this is often where “I always rush” turns out to have been based on a few memorable cases rather than an actual pattern.

Knowing that you rush or drag is useful. Knowing what to do about it is better.

We have a separate guide explaining what rushing and dragging are, why they happen, and which exercises can help with each one: Rushing vs dragging: how to tell which one you’re actually doing.

And if you’re curious about where these numbers come from, how iQuantize gets them from MIDI, and why timing stability is measured separately from playing ahead or behind the click, you can read more on our Drum Timing Analyzer page.