The Log Book
An opinionated music practice tracker
The idea
When you are on a busy schedule, highly structured music practice can feel cumbersome and boring. At the same time, loose “practice” on an irregular schedule can make it hard to know what to do, leaving you unsatisfied with your progress.
This is an opinionated music practice app, meaning that you can modify the routine to your goals, but the structure of this app follows a specific pre-defined method. The focus of this method is consistency. We believe in frequency over volume. You can run this program in under 15 minutes or until your fingers start bleeding.
How it works
The Spine
The program begins with a "spine," similar to a warmup. This is a short routine of only the essentials. If you only have 15 minutes to practice on a given day, you can do only this. Put things that you are focusing on, and things that benefit from frequency here (memorization, sight-reading, technique, etc.). Keep it short and under 3-5 exercises.
You can set spine exercises in the settings menu.
Tip: If you get sick of an exercise, uncheck the "on" box to remove it from the practice log. You can always add it back in later by re-checking the checkbox.
Focus Areas
You can set up to 3 focus areas in the settings menu. These are big-picture focus areas that are distinct. On a given day, you can focus your practice to a single big-picture area. Additionally, you can choose from a list of active exercises for each focus. Lastly, if you're too busy to practice on a given day, just set the focus to "Free" and take the day off guilt free.
Like the spine exercises, you can set exercises for each focus in the settings menu. Keep the number of "active" exercises short (3-5), enough to have fun variety in exercise selection, while making you repeat exercises at enough frequency to let the knowledge stick.
Tip: This is a great way to have a reserve of exercises. If you are doom-scrolling and come across a cool exercise, just note it down in the settings menu and uncheck the "on" checkbox. Later on, when you want to restructure your routine, you have a reserve of interesting exercises to choose from.
Weekly Logs
The weekly logs are for practice elements that take multiple sessions, such as playing in all 12 keys, navigating every fretboard position, or working on difficult repertoire. At the start of every week, you select your focus for that week. For example, you can set a focus area to be "Key" and then at the start of every week, you can set the key you want to focus on for that week (e.g. E major).
You can set up to 3 weekly focus areas in the settings menu, and you can set the week's focuses in the "Start week" menu.
Final thoughts
As you can might have noticed, there’s a lot of flexibility in this routine, but there’s enough structure to make sure that practices are worthwhile. Each exercise can be as structured (practice major triads up and down the guitar neck) or as unstructured (noodle on A minor blues and practice your guitar face) as you would like. Everyone has their own balance, and this app is adjustable to how much you want to put into practice at any given time.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to raise a GitHub issue or contact me directly on Instagram or LinkedIn.