Every stage prints a week: 4 nights drawn from 13 bills, each with its own billing, its own brief and its own fee. The house night is always on the sheet: no promoter, no brief, the room as it comes.

Every wild note is a piece of notation, and the notation is the move: a quarter marches on the beat, a sixteenth flits, a staccato hops, an accent plants and rams, a glissando slides straight through you, a whole note is a wall the kit's shots die in, a dotted note gets back up once and a tied pair drags a tie across the floor. Sharps and flats are marks a note wears, not notes of their own: a sharp shrugs off the waves and a flat the shots, so the band you write decides what you can clear. Every one of them is music the rests set loose when they silenced it, and taming it feeds the jam. The rests are the enemy: silence with guns, the short ones running with the swarm and shooting, the long ones the bosses. A longer silence is a bigger boss.

Ordinary shows alternate note rushes with marked Rest hunts that reward a power-up crate. Then the long rests arrive: the bosses, shortest to longest, and a longer silence is a bigger boss. Each one closes an act with a signature move and three health phases. Read the floor warnings, dodge changing attacks, and punish the brief green openings. The maxima rest is the longest silence notation can write, and it is the heaviest thing in the game.

A road case is thrown onto the stage while you fight, and it lands where you have to walk to. Break it open with your beat: what is inside is only seen once the lid is off. Walk over the sign and the band follows it for a few bars, and your kit changes with it. There are 11 of them, every one a real marking off a score, and every one says in plain words what it does the moment you take it.