A very basic and badly thought out teaching aid that has no specific audience and very poor presentation.

User Rating: 3 | Tenohira Gakushuu: Zettai Onkan Training DS DS
By U1 | Review Date:
Rhythm 'n Notes is not a rhythm game. It is meant to be a music theory tutorial program teaching tonal and rhythmic skills but it also fails at teaching you anything. The lessons you go through in the program are no more than tests that do not provide any theory background. In fact, to pass the tests, you already have to be very familiar with the material or progress purely through trial and error, learning nothing either way. Rhythm 'n Notes is not a rhythm game. It is meant to be a music theory tutorial program teaching tonal and rhythmic skills but it also fails at teaching you anything. The lessons you go through in the program are no more than tests that do not provide any theory background. In fact, to pass the tests, you already have to be very familiar with the material or progress purely through trial and error, learning nothing either way. The first thing that hits you when you start the program is that the presentation is very unprofessional and garish. Your 'guide' (who says nothing and either dances or stands with 4 frames of animation) is an anthropomorphised stag beetle called Tsunami. She is not very charming and is slightly creepy. The menus and lessons are all presented in the same limited amount of colours, all a different shade of pastel blue and electric pink and are more likely to depress than inspire.

There are two sections to the program, Notes (which starts off as Chords) and Rhythm. The Notes section involves identifying chords on the piano by listening to them alone. The Rhythm lessons involve listening to a rhythm, remembering it and then repeating it back.

Let's start with Notes. Before the first set of lessons you are asked to listen to sets of three piano chords at your leisure and remember how they sound. None of the 27 chords listed are actually named, you are only told which notes from the third octave on the piano they are made of, which makes them completely useless.
In the actual first lesson, you listen to a chord being played and choose which chord has just been played from a multiple choice list. You are not allowed to listen to the chord again and you can't listen to your choice of answer until after you've selected it so you can't use your sense of relative pitch (if you have already been taught that). To get the answers correct through your own merit rather than luck you either have to:

1. Have a skill called Absolute Pitch (the ability to name a note or chord just by hearing it) which is a rare genetic trait in humans. Congratulations.
2. Be very familiar with piano chords already and recognise them by sight. What are you doing with this software?
3. Cheat and have a piano in front of you and play the chords yourself. This may be what you are meant to do but I doubt it because that makes the portability aspect of the DS useless if you have to be at your piano and they could have just let you listen to the chords on the DS.

We'll never know, because there is absolutely no instructions for the tests, which is like having a piano teacher who not only dumped a textbook on you and left, but also ripped out most of the pages in the book and used White-Out on all the salient points.. In order to progress to the next lesson, you have to get the correct answer 8 times. It seems like 4, but after the first 4 it will ask you if you'd like to do a 'note test' which is in fact the same lesson over again. If you say you don't want to do it, it will dump you back to the lesson menu and you have to start again. That is one of many terrible design quirks that must be in part due to bad translation.

After you complete the first lesson, the second lesson is unlocked, and so on. You are not allowed to progress to the next lesson without getting 100% in the first one, so if you're stuck, bad luck. Not that looking at the next lesson will help you, because they are all the same. More multiple choice questions, with other new, unnamed chords. This makes lessons very boring and is very lazy, with no variety or interactive games, there is no reason to chose this over a book. Hopefully a much better book.

If you get a question wrong in a lesson, it lets you know straight away. As a student, you're eager to progress through the lessons. You know that you have to get 100% to progress, so even if you go through the rest of the questions and the long 'your score is' screen, you now have no chance to get anything but a ten second long 'Too bad, try again!' screen that you can't skip, unless you exit the lesson and start again. So you might as well do that over and over rather than having an excruciatingly long wait between 'failing' a lesson and starting it again. A good tutorial program would tell you where you are going wrong, offer some encouragement, specialised exercises, further information and let you do another lesson and come back later if you've had enough. Rhythm 'n Notes does none of these.

The titular Rhythm lessons are just as pointless and are extremely short. There are 16 one minute lessons, which have a very steep learning curve ando so are either patronisingly easy or intentionaly complicated to the point that they make no rhythmic sense. Tsunami taps out a beat which she says you have to listen to, remember and repeat. It is then your turn and you press the L button to tap out the rhythm back. These beats quickly get longer than 2 bars and progress into 3/4 time (no attempt is made to explain either of these concepts in-game, they're just there). Near the end of the lessons, too late for there to be any point, a second drum with a higher pitch is added, which is played with the R button, to add complexity to the rhythms. There is no metronome to keep time for you, although there is a very faint beat in the background. This can make it hard to judge when to press the beat unless you already have internal rhythm.
In order to pass these lessons on your own merit, you have to either:

1. Have Eidetic (photographic) memory to be able to instantly learn the random rhythm of 36 beats in sequence. Congratulations.
2. Repeat the lesson over and over, tap out the rhythms on the desk and learn them off by heart. 3. Already have an internal sense of rhythm, close your eyes and do as #2.

4. Ignore what Tsunami says and just press the button at the same time that the time line goes along the stave over the notes. This requires no sense of rhythm and does not instil it, in fact, you can complete the lessons while being awfully out of time, as long as you press the button while the timeline is over the note. This makes the whole system broken and the most likely way a student will complete these tasks. If you get even one beat slightly out of time during the two times you're meant to repeat the beat back, you fail and have to sit though the score calculation and the 'oh dear, try again' screen and then sit through Tsunami doing the rhythm for you again, even if you already know it, which makes ploughing through the lessons frustrating.

A good rhythm coaching software would have hundreds of different rhythms, getting progressively more difficult and available to practice with and without metronome. It would include backing tracks to show how the rhythm relates to and works within a piece of music. It would also outline the basics of time signatures and notation at the very least. Rhythm 'n Notes does not do this, which makes it a very poor learning tool for rhythm.

As Rhythm 'n Notes is the only music tutor on the DS and it is a good idea, it's painful to not be able to recommend it. As it is, the program is cheap, badly thought out and as it doesn't seem to be aimed at or cater for any level of musician, is a waste of time...

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