Hey, no need to say sorry, thanks so much for taking the time to play the game and giving such detailed feedback!
I iterated on the rhythm panel quite a lot as I wanted to try and make this part of the game feel as good as possible, so I'm grateful for your suggestions to help improve this.
Regarding the points you raised:
1. I'll think about this, I want it to be easy for the player to internalize how many misses it takes before the notes reset, rather than have this vary too much between instruments. I'm also ok with the first few instruments being quite easy and forgiving, so I might not change this too much.
2. I'm on board with this one. In your suggestion do you mean that it should wait until the end of the section before switching or just that the last note should finish playing before switching? The reason I did it like this is that I thought the player would not realize they had completed the section and continue to try and input notes. However I think it would be better to do as you suggest and also think of a way of showing visually that the instrument is completed after hitting the last note.
3. I'm with you on this one too. I will try doing the screen bounce with just the background, I can definitely see how the rhythm bar moving makes things awkward for the player. Maybe I'll also experiment with smaller bouncing for the transparent notes, as I still want it to feel somewhat good to hit these.
Thanks for the suggestions, they were very helpful :)