Following in the steps of @Mark_Rocka, I’ve built myself a practice app and thought I’d share it with y’all.
(Disclaimer: this is not intended to replace Jam Trainer in any way; in fact, I use my app beside Jam Trainer for my practice. JT is a super awesome app!)
It’s called Practice Monster (so called because I found that you can get .monster domains and thought it would be fun to get one) and is the third (and hopefully final) iteration of an idea that I’ve been mulling for years now. The core concept is as follows:
- Add every song that you know on each instrument that you play.
- Tag each song with a proficiency level, from “Just starting” to “Fully learned”
- The app generates a practice list for you based on these songs.
More specifically, the app builds a set of songs (by default, 5, although you can change this) that will always feature the songs you are learning while slowly cycling through your learned repertoire. For me, it was always easy to default to playing the same few songs instead of properly cycling through everything I know, so this helps force me to keep every song fairly fresh.
When you practice each song, you get to rate how well you did. Over time, this lets the song automatically increase its saved proficiency to match your reported progress.
There are a number of other features throughout the app, including a basic tuner and metronome, history information for your practice, and a very basic friends system that specifically doesn’t provide a public user search. (IMO, the best way to approach social features in an app like this is to require users to manually share contact info with each other to connect.) I plan to keep adding things as I want them (and I will happily take feature requests!).
Hopefully you find this interesting or useful, and feel free to roast me if you don’t like something!
