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One day at the kit, six pieces of feedback, one build. Most of it you can hear; the rest you hand to your teacher.

• One bar count-in. When you start, the metronome counts down audibly and as a big number, then comes the one. So the click never starts mid-bar. If you want it otherwise: none or two bars, under More.
• The screen stays on while it clicks. And the tempo trainer can raise the tempo every few minutes instead of every few bars; by bars it got too steep too quickly.
• The report for your teacher, redesigned. Page 1 says in twenty seconds how the weeks went: sessions, days practised, longest streak, a practice calendar, for each exercise the tempo and how it moved, plus the open questions. From page 2 on, every day with all its notes. Your name at the top, if you enter it.
• Practise freely. A session without a practice list, with a duration or counting up, a note at the end. Counts in the history and the report like any other.
• No weekly goal nobody set. "Today" now only shows what you practised. You set a goal if you want one.
• Sharing exercises is gone. Sheet music is usually someone else's material; a button that sends it on does not belong in the app. The report and the backup can still be passed on.

Opening Drumbook for the first time gave you a greeting, a thought about grooves, and then an empty form with eight fields. If you don't yet know what a paradiddle is, there is nothing to put in it. The app asked first for exactly the knowledge it is meant to build.

• One sentence and one question. The first screen says what Drumbook is and asks a single thing: do you take lessons? Your answer sets the right things up; you can also tap past it.
• Six exercises to get going. Single and double stroke roll, paradiddle, eighth-note groove, switching hi-hat to ride, a fill over one bar. Each says what to do, not what it is. Ordinary exercises: change or delete them like anything else.
• Empty screens offer the next step instead of just naming it. And the lessons part explains what it is for, rather than showing a heading over an empty box.

Anyone practising from a textbook had it hardest so far: the repeat sign was missing at the right edge, a hi-hat circle slipped into the line next door, and two columns on one page got mixed up. Every sheet is worked out once more for this; what you taught the app stays.

• The book's page number no longer sits in the music. Footers and instruction lines stay out; bar numbers, counting hints and hi-hat circles stay in.
• The tempo above the sheet is remembered. What you set there now sticks to the exercise; until now it only stayed in the practice bar.
• Nothing runs off the screen at large text sizes. The menu, teaching the app, long exercise titles, the tempo slider and the beat lights stay readable even at the largest setting.
• The app now says so when syncing is stuck. "Today" then tells you how much is sitting on this device alone, and the sentence that matters: don't delete the app right now.

Your teacher says "ghost notes here, and that bar slower", and by the next lesson you no longer know where "here" was. Now you can write on the sheet: with the Apple Pencil, with a finger in writing mode, or as a marker with text.

• What sits on the page sits in the ribbon at the same spot and the other way round. Even on a textbook page that was scanned askew.
• A layer you can switch on and off. While playing through a setlist the notes stay visible but locked: nobody draws by accident on stage.

A textbook page captured with "Scan sheet music" was barely read at all: given nine exercises it found eighty-one "lines" and preferred to show the printed page. A photo of the same page worked. Now both do.

• Column one, then column two: textbook pages run through in the order you play them. Curved pages are no longer cut into columns, and lines under dense sixteenths stay one line.
• Behind the gear icon there is now a menu instead of one very long settings page: practice, reminders, lessons, device sync, export and backup, help. Nothing has gone missing.
• Seven buttons got bigger, exactly the ones you hit with a stick in your hand: ribbon and page in the setlist player, tempo and back while teaching the app, stop in the metronome bar.
• Sheets and music right when you create something. A new exercise had to be saved and reopened before you could attach a sheet. Now both sit in the form.

If you made a backup in the morning, practised all day and read that morning's backup back in the evening, you lost the whole day, silently and without a word. Now the app counts first and tells you: "Your app is newer than this backup. 17 entries will fall back to the older state." Going back on purpose is still possible; going back by accident is not.

• Everything stays readable at the largest text size. The badge in the library used to fall apart into a vertical chain of letters: "Warm up" became W/ar/m/u/p.
• With VoiceOver the library is seven times faster. An exercise row is one element now instead of up to seven, and the metronome bar's buttons finally say what they do.
• The metronome says so when it can't play, during a phone call, for instance. Until now the start button simply did nothing.

Until now sheet music lived in the library, and there was no way to reach it from a running session, you would have had to leave the exercise. Nobody does that with sticks in their hands. Now a note symbol sits in the metronome bar: tap it once and the sheet fills the screen, with clock, pause, next and the metronome as a slim bar below.

• Photographed book pages are recognised. Attach a photo of a page from your practice book to an exercise and Drumbook finds the staves in it, even in two or three columns, even when the page lies curved in the open book. Tested on two real pages: nineteen exercises out of nineteen. Before that: not a single one.
• Landscape while you practise. Sideways, everything now sits side by side: clock and controls on the left, metronome and running order on the right.
• Songs straight into a session. When you put a session together and in the middle of one there is now an “Exercises | Songs” tab; until now songs could only come in through a setlist.
• Bigger buttons on the metronome. With sticks in your hands you hit things with a thumb, not a fingertip.
• Your settings travel between devices too. Weekly target, break length, your teacher's name; until now those were two separate worlds.

Syncing between devices works. What you plan on the iPad in the evening is on the iPhone at the kit the next day, with no account, no sign-in, no password. It runs through your own iCloud. And if you delete the app and install it again, everything is back within seconds.

One thing matters here, and it is the reason this route was chosen: your exercises live in your private iCloud database, not on a server of mine. I cannot reach them, and that is not a promise, it simply isn't possible.

Alongside that: an evening at the kit and eleven pieces of feedback, all of them built in. The click now stops on its own during a break. The running order can be dragged into shape. An exercise can be deleted, not just archived. And the report for your teacher now includes what struck you about each individual exercise.

Open a piece of sheet music and the staves are stacked across the full width of the screen: no zooming, no dragging with damp hands. What's new is the following: tap through it once at the table, and after that the ribbon rolls on by itself with the click. Repeats and jumps can be taught in as you go, D. S. al Coda included.

The part that makes it usable: the sheet counts in beats, not in seconds. Taught at 90, it still fits at 130 without touching anything.

And from this day on, this site has been reachable at drumbook.de.

As of today Drumbook runs on TestFlight. That is Apple's way of letting people try an app before it goes on sale. With a small circle for now, so the first bugs don't land on the people who put their name on the list. The open round follows once the points the practice test turned up have been worked through, and whoever is on the list gets the link first.

The app exists in full in both German and English: every line, right into the report for your teacher. The reason was my own lessons: my teacher works at a bilingual school.