How to play

A round opens by rolling a tempo between 60 and 120 BPM. Everyone in the room gets the same number and nobody can change it — there is no tempo control in the editor. The loop is always 8 bars of 4/4, which runs about 16 seconds at the fast end and about 32 at the slow end.

The clock is four minutes and it is the same clock for everybody. It starts when the round starts, not when you start.

Drum tracks are a row of cells, one per sixteenth note. Click a cell to place a hit, click it again to remove it. That is the entire interaction, and a lot of very good loops never need anything else.

The fastest way through is to build one bar and then press the repeat button on the track, which copies that bar across the whole loop. Then go back and change something in the second half.

Click a melodic track's name to open it. Click empty space to place a note, drag the note to move it in time and pitch, drag its right edge to make it longer, double-click to delete it.

Notes land on whatever grid the Snap control is set to, from a whole bar down to a thirty-second — and triplets, which are there because a triplet hat is not reachable from powers of two.

Ctrl and scroll zooms in on the point under your cursor, or pinch on a trackpad. Shift and scroll moves along the loop.

• Space plays and stops.
• Enter sends the playhead back to the top.
• Ctrl + Z undoes, and it goes back a long way.
• Delete removes whatever notes are selected.

When the clock runs out, every entry plays back — same tempo, same bars, so the comparison is only ever about what you wrote. Then the room votes, points move, and the winning loop can go up in the library.

You cannot vote for yourself, and in ranked you cannot see who made what until the vote closes.

Private rooms have no ladder in them at all. Ranked does: you queue, get matched near your level, and your points move with the result.

The first couple of rungs are an on-ramp — a bad match still moves you forward. Higher up, a loss starts to cost, which is what makes the climb mean anything.