Music Practice Assistant

Track and accelerate your progress on your entire repertoire on a very granular level, down to subsections of sections of pieces. Practice the parts that need the most work, using scientific "best practices" of spaced repetition and interleaving to maximize the effectiveness of your practice time. Regulate your practice with the built-in metronome and timers, and review graphs of your practice log.

Music Practice Assistant works by keeping a log of what you've practiced, when, and how well you played it, from the big-picture level all the way down to the level of the short phrases and passages that make up a piece. It allows you to build better practice habits by interleaving the order in which you practice those passages, as well as by focusing mainly on passages you found difficult or haven't played in a while.

Think of it as a simple practice journal combined with an intelligent music tutor. Amateur and professional musicians use it to master pieces more effectively and to keep their repertoire in top shape. By using our practice planning algorithm based on the principles of spaced repetition and interleaved practice, you'll make the most of your practice time and build strong habits of deliberate practice. Originally designed for pianists, Music Practice Assistant is now used by musicians of all instruments to structure and log their practice.

Why? Too often our musical practice suffers from problems:

- We play the fun parts over and over, neglecting tricky parts that need more practice.
- We play a piece from start to finish, ignoring mistakes or maybe correcting them once, even though this is effectively “practicing the mistakes” and reinforcing them in muscle memory.
- We try to cram a passage into memory by playing it over and over all at once, even though this has been shown to be ineffective.
- We allow our old favorite to become rusty, and it takes much more work to polish than if we had just revisited it even once every few months.
- We allow ourselves to plateau, rather than constantly push at the edges of our abilities.
- We practice without concrete goals in mind, with no feedback cycle in place, and without countless other well-studied elements of effective practice.

Music Practice Assistant is a practice journal designed to help with all of these obstacles and many others. If you use it to keep track of your repertoire and practice sessions, it will intelligently suggest what to practice. Decades of research tells us that techniques like interleaved practice, spaced repetition, and deliberate practice can improve our learning and memory, yet often we do the exact opposite, to the detriment of our music. We’ve taken this research and used it to design a tool to help amateur and professional musicians alike improve the quality of their practice.