Sunday Keys tap tempo, tapped by your drummer
Sunday Keys sounds great on a Sunday morning, and its delays, arps and tremolo are a big part of why. They all need a tempo. The catch: Sunday Keys doesn't take MIDI clock. It has a tap tempo, and that's it.
So somebody taps. Every song, every service. Miss it, and the dotted-eighth repeats run at the last song's tempo. Nail it, and it's still frozen at four taps while the drummer pushes the chorus. Teams with in-ears and a click can run tracks and live with it. Most teams don't have in-ears.
The fix: let the drums tap it
Sunday Keys' tap tempo can be MIDI-learned. That means anything that sends a MIDI message on every beat can be the one tapping. If that something is listening to the drummer, the delays follow the drummer: push, lay back, fill, break.
That's the job DrumClock does. A phone or iPad near the kit listens to the drums, locks on the stick count-off, and sends a tap-tempo CC on every beat. It can send MIDI clock at the same time for anything else in the rig that takes clock (Helix, Strymon, MainStage, Ableton, synth arps).
Setup, once
- In DrumClock: open Outputs and turn on Tap tempo CC.
- In Sunday Keys: open MIDI Learn and pick Tap Tempo.
- Back in DrumClock: tap Send 4 test taps. Sunday Keys learns the message. The mapping sticks.
- Play. From here on, every beat taps the tempo for you.
Same iPad? Pick DrumClock as the MIDI input in Sunday Keys and you're done, no cables. Running Sunday Keys on a laptop or a second iPad? A phone in the drum cage, a USB MIDI interface and a 5-pin cable is the tightest connection. Network MIDI works over Ethernet; Bluetooth is fine for rehearsal.
What it handles on a real Sunday
- Count-offs: three or four clicks on the sticks and the tempo is set before beat one.
- Fills and ghost notes: they land between beats and are ignored.
- Breaks and rubato: the last tempo holds until the drums come back, or tap Hold for a free-time bridge.
- Half-time feel: one tap of ÷2 or ×2 fixes a beat tracker's octave guess.
- Set lists: save a tempo per song in set order so the clock is there before the count-in.
Try it this week
DrumClock is free to try for 14 days with everything on. After that the free tier keeps tempo detection, presets and 10 minutes of MIDI output a day, enough to map Sunday Keys and rehearse a song. Pro is $19.99 a year or $49.99 once. Audio is analysed on the device and never recorded or uploaded.
More rigs (Helix, Strymon, Ableton, MainStage): how to sync delays and arps to a live drummer.
Sunday Keys is a product of Sunday Sounds. DrumClock is an independent app and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Sunday Sounds.