The Beat Guide: Every Preset and When to Use It

The six presets

Every beat is synthesized in your browser rather than streamed or sampled, so switching beats costs nothing and nothing is downloaded beyond the page itself.

Beat	BPM	Level	Feel
Boom Bap	88	Easy	Wide, unhurried pocket. The most forgiving beat for a first round — a full half-second between the target word and beat four.
Lo-Fi	82	Easy	Slowest beat in the game. Soft drums, heavy swing — use it to practise hearing the pocket rather than reacting to it.
Afrobeat	104	Medium	Syncopated and busy. The kick lands off the grid, so you have to feel the beat rather than count it.
Boom Trap	120	Medium	Straight down the middle. A clean four-on-the-floor reference beat — the best one for checking whether you are actually on time.
Trap	140	Hard	Half-time feel: the snare only lands on beat three, so the grid feels twice as long as the tempo suggests. Fast hats, slow pulse.
Drill	142	Expert	The hardest preset. Sliding kick pattern with a half-time snare — the pocket moves every bar, so there is nothing to memorise.

Tempo is not difficulty

It is tempting to assume the slowest beat is the easiest. That is only half true.

A slow beat gives you more time to think of a rhyme, which is a real advantage. But it also stretches the pocket, so a 90 ms error that would be hidden at 140 BPM is plainly audible at 82 BPM. Slow beats are forgiving of your vocabulary and unforgiving of your timing; fast beats are the reverse.

The practical consequence: start slow to build the reflex, then speed up to test it. If you start fast, you will not be able to hear what you are doing wrong.

Which beat should you start on

Start with Lo-Fi (82 BPM) or Boom Bap (88 BPM). Both have a wide, obvious pocket and a snare that marks the beat clearly, which makes it easy to hear whether you landed.

Move up when you are holding accuracy above roughly 75% with hints off. The natural next step is Afrobeat (104) or Boom Trap (120) — the first because it is syncopated and forces you to feel rather than count, the second because it is straight and exposes whether you were actually on time or just close.

Leave Trap (140) and Drill (142) until last. Both use a half-time snare, meaning the snare only lands on beat three. The grid feels twice as long as the tempo suggests, and the pocket moves — there is nothing to memorise.

Why some beats are marked “hard”

The difficulty labels reflect the grid, not the tempo:

• Easy beats have a steady, predictable kick and a snare on beats two and four. You can count them.
• Medium beats either syncopate the kick or move at a tempo where counting gets in the way.
• Hard beats use a half-time snare, so the reference point you were counting against is only there half as often.

That last category is the interesting one. Once the snare only appears every other beat, you cannot count your way through — you have to hold the pulse internally, which is the actual skill the game is training.

The words change too

Each beat is paired with a word theme, and the theme matters as much as the tempo. Concrete themes such as Food & Everyday are easier because the vocabulary has many obvious rhymes. Abstract themes such as Pain & Mind are harder for the opposite reason — the words are long and their rhyme families are small.

If a round feels impossible, check the theme before you blame the tempo. A hard beat with an easy theme is usually more tractable than an easy beat with a hard theme.

Hearing the difference

The fastest way to understand any of this is to play the same theme across two tempos and compare your accuracy. Try it in the game — pick a theme, play eight bars on Lo-Fi, then eight bars on Boom Trap. The gap between the two numbers tells you whether you are currently limited by thinking time or by timing precision.

For the underlying drill, see how to rhyme on beat. For how tempo changes what you can physically say in a bar, see how BPM changes your flow.