What's New?

Download any scale, arpeggio or progression in all 12 keys as a PDF or an image, ready to print.

Your home page and profile have a cleaner layout, with your recent videos, playlists and friends' activity up front.

The practice log is now the home for your practice: goals with timers, lesson notes, offline practice, and where your time went each month. Open it from the Practice Log card on your home page.

A new practice tool that displays scales and arpeggios in any key as notation and tab with fingerings, fretboard diagrams, and other helpful visual aids. Pick a key on the circle of fifths and switch between scales and arpeggios.

Scales include major and minor, the modes, pentatonic and blues, bluegrass and old-time, bebop and jazz scales. Arpeggios go from triads through sevenths to 9ths, 11ths and 13ths.

It works on mandolin, mandola, octave mandolin, guitar, banjo, violin and bass. Everything defaults to open positions and you can switch to FFcP shapes, CAGED shapes, other positions or a single string. A fretboard diagram shows where the notes are and violin shows finger numbers.

Play them up, down, in thirds or sixths, in groups, or as chords on each degree, in straight, swing or dotted rhythms. Arpeggios can also start on the 3rd, 5th or 7th, or go 1 5 3 8. Add a drone to hear how each note sounds against the key, and loop through all 12 keys or speed up a little each time.

The circle of fifths shades the keys you've practiced. Save the notation and diagram as an image, print one exercise or all 12 keys, or send a link to a friend or student.

A new practice tool for getting out of rhythmic ruts when you solo. Pick from a library of bluegrass, swing and jazz, bebop, rut-breaker and mandolin chop rhythms, try the rhythm of the day, or try a random one.

Each rhythm shows as notation and as a step grid, and plays over a click with adjustable tempo and swing.

Write your own rhythms in the grid editor and share them. Time spent and your top tempo for each rhythm go into your practice log.

Turn a song's detected chords into a practice track (from uploaded audio, or from the Chrome extension's Analyze button on YouTube videos for now): a chart that follows the video as it plays, with real bar lines, sections and repeats, and a band to play along with. Or write one from scratch. Set the key, tempo, time signature and capo, add a count-in, dial in swing, and let Speedup raise the tempo after every pass.

The band is a steel-string or archtop guitar strumming every chord as it is written, an upright bass on the root and fifth, and a mandolin chop on the backbeat, each with its own level, pan and mute. For now the band is put together from open-source sample libraries while my own recorded sound packs are in the works. Tap a measure to play from it, drag across several to loop them, group tracks into song lists, and share either with a link.

Three new courses are in beta: A Year of Daily Practice and Soloing with Chord Cells for any instrument, and Bach on Mandolin. Feedback welcome.

Song analysis now hears the beats and bar lines the band actually plays, keeps up when the tempo drifts, leaves silent or spoken intros without chords, recognizes seventh chords, and marks the parts that repeat. Uploaded audio is analyzed in full. For YouTube videos, detection comes from the Chrome extension for now (press Analyze key, tempo and chords in Pitch & Vocal while the song plays); analyzing them directly is in the works.

Sheet playback now uses recorded piano, guitar, violin, and bass, with a new plucked mandolin voice.

Chords now have full stems and sixteenth notes are beamed better. Wrapped lines leave room for the key signature and tab no longer collides with beams.

The frets tool now covers the 5-string banjo and the tenor banjo / mandola, with a tuning picker for open G, double C, sawmill and open D.

Videos, playlists, sheets, your profile and the feed get their buttons tidied up into a single action bar.

The fretboard tool speaks guitar as well now: six strings with CAGED, double stops, and scales.

Each practice tool now has its own page, with a tab bar on desktop and a dropdown on phones to move between them. Only the tool you are looking at loads, so pages open faster.

The landing page at /practice-tools gives every tool a card with a short description, and picks up where you left off on the ones that track it.

Tune up right in the app. Slow down listens through your mic and never records or uploads a thing. Two views:

Needle: the classic tuner. Shows the note you're playing and how many cents sharp or flat you are, with a live needle that turns green in tune.

Staff: your notes drawn on a musical staff as they scroll by which is great for seeing where notes sit and for students learning to read (also useful for non-fretted instruments!)

Pick an instrument (mandolin, guitar, violin, ukulele, bass and more) to tune the open strings, tap a string to hear its reference tone, or use Chromatic to check any fretted or capo'd note. Calibrate A4 for baroque or ensemble pitch. Find it on the Practice Tools page, the toolbar dropdown, and any video's practice card.

Make the video page yours. Drag the cards below the player into whatever order works best for how you practice.

Rearrange: grab a card by its handle and drop it where you want.

Collapse: tuck away cards you don't need right now; they shrink to a slim bar you can expand any time.

Your layout is saved to your account and applied across all your videos.

Hey all! I made an upgrade to the practice timeline for looping and markers.

Scrub the playhead: grab the red playhead and drag to move through the track (works on touch too). It keeps playing if it was already playing.

Drag to create a loop: drag across an empty part of the timeline to instantly loop that section. Saving it adds start/end markers so it behaves like any other loop.

Resize loops by their edges: drag the handles on either side of a loop to expand or contract it. For marker-based loops this moves the underlying marker. Moving the start edge restarts the loop from its new beginning.

Time readout: hover the timeline to see the exact time under your cursor, and while scrubbing or resizing a loop the time follows your finger (works on touch too).

Snap to markers while scrubbing or resizing so you can land exactly on a spot.

Play from a marker: select a single marker and hit the new play button to start playback right from that spot.

Thank you everyone for your continued support and feedback!

Upload a PDF or image of printed sheet music and automatically import it into the interactive notation editor. Powered by optical music recognition (Audiveris).

The scanner detects notes, rests, key signatures, time signatures, tempo markings, and more. After scanning, review and edit the result in the full notation editor with playback.

Find the Import button on the Sheets page or in Practice Tools.

Early release! I'll keep adding instruments, shapes, drills, and practice modes as I see what's useful! Try it out and let me know what you'd like to see.

A new interactive fretboard visualizer for mandolin. Pick any key, explore scales (major, minor, pentatonics, blues, modes, chromatic) and arpeggios (triads, 7ths), and see every note light up across the neck.

Filter the view by FFcP shapes (four-finger closed position: 1st through 4th finger on the root) or by positions (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th). The active shape's anchor note is highlighted so you can see where your hand sits.

Filter by double stops between pairs of strings!

Switch between scale-degree and note-name labels, toggle sharp or flat spellings, pick keys arranged by circle of fifths, and click any note on the fretboard to hear it.

Find it under Practice Tools and the Frets card.

This is an early release! If you spot anything odd or have feature requests, please let us know!

Sheets are now a full-featured workspace for your musical documents. Create exercises and drills with the notation editor, transcribe solos and melodies, or build teaching materials with rich text instructions and embedded notation.

Attach a YouTube video or upload audio to practice alongside your sheet, add PDF scans for reference, tag and organize by instrument, key, and difficulty, and share publicly for other musicians to discover, comment on, and practice with.

Link a sheet to any video in your library and it appears on the video's page for quick access.

This is an early release! If you spot anything odd or have feature requests, please let us know!

A brand new notation editor built from the ground up. Write music directly in the browser with point-and-click note entry, keyboard shortcuts, and a full toolbar for durations, accidentals, rests, ties, slurs, tuplets, and chords.

I built this as a kind of work of love which is a custom renderer and editor tailored to the needs of musicians who hate the clunkiness of traditional notation software.

Supports treble and bass clef (coming soon)/grand staff (coming soon), tablature for mandolin, guitar, bass, banjo, and violin, and professional engraving features including grace notes, dynamics, hairpins, articulations, fingerings, lyrics, tempo markings, key and time signature changes, repeat signs, volta brackets, navigation marks (D.S. al Coda, D.C. al Fine), rehearsal marks, and 8va/8vb lines.

Built-in playback lets you hear what you've written. Mobile-friendly with touch support for note entry and editing on the go. Your work saves automatically as you go.

All notation examples in courses now use the new custom renderer with higher quality engraving, playback, and tablature support. Stay tuned — this opens the door for some exciting interactive course content coming soon!

Practice Tools now has its own link in the header for quick access to courses, the metronome, and more. Look soon for more practice tools too! ;)

Courses are now available in Practice Tools. The first course, Basic Music Theory, covers notes, scales, rhythm, intervals, chords, progressions, arpeggios, and more with interactive notation and tablature. More courses are on the way — we're looking to collaborate with musicians on specialized topics. Feedback is welcome!

Three new ways to compete: Mastery rewards practicing at higher speeds, Diversity tracks how many unique videos you practice, and Helpful ranks users by likes and comments received on their shared content.

Leaderboards now show all ranked users with pagination, compact icon tabs, and remembered selections. An interactive rank history chart shows your progress over time with click-to-practice-log. Calendar days without practice are now clickable for adding notes, with corner indicators and hover tooltips for days with notes.

See how your leaderboard rank has changed over time with an interactive chart on the leaderboards page. The line color shifts based on your rank, star markers highlight when you hit #1, and you can click any point to jump to that day's practice log.

Import entire YouTube playlists by pasting a playlist URL on the playlists page. Sync anytime to pull in new videos that were added to the YouTube playlist. You can also mix in your own videos from your library — imported playlists are fully editable just like any other playlist. I also added new searching and sorting options for ease of use with large playlists.

Shared videos and playlists now show how many times they've been viewed.

Upload video files alongside audio files. Want to slow down your lesson recordings? Recorded a cool solo at a concert? Slow Down's got you covered. Videos play inline with full speed, pitch, and vocal controls. Pitch shifting and vocal reduce/enhance use a server-extracted audio track for clean processing at any speed.

Fine-tune pitch in 10-cent increments for uploaded audio and video files. Perfect for matching tracks that are slightly out of standard tuning.

YouTube Shorts URLs are now fully supported. Paste a Shorts link and it will be recognized just like any other YouTube video.

A new feature guide covers every section of the app with tips, keyboard shortcuts, and how-tos. Find it in Quick Links on your dashboard.

Check out hand-picked videos worth practicing on your dashboard, feed, or the new Featured page. Each featured video includes editorial notes and links to the original with all its markers and loops intact.

Reduce or enhance vocals in real time using a machine learning model that runs entirely in your browser. A neural network listens to the audio stream, builds a spectral profile of the vocal frequencies, and applies it on the fly — no server round-trip required. Slide toward Reduce to push vocals into the background, or toward Enhance to bring them forward. Works with both YouTube videos and uploaded audio. Requires the Slow Down browser extension v1.1.0 or later (should update automatically, or grab the latest from the Chrome Web Store).

Slow Down now detects the musical key of your videos automatically. Audio is captured by the browser extension, encoded, and analyzed server-side to determine the key. The detected key is displayed in the song info panel. Still in beta — results are generally accurate but may occasionally miss, especially with short clips or complex harmony. I'll keep refining it. Requires the Slow Down browser extension v1.1.0 or later (should update automatically, or grab the latest from the Chrome Web Store).

Automatic BPM detection for your videos. Like key detection, audio is captured by the extension and analyzed server-side. The detected BPM is displayed in the song info panel and stays synced with the speed controls — when you slow a track down to 75%, the BPM display updates to show the effective tempo so you always know exactly how fast you're practicing. Still in beta — accuracy is good for most tracks but may be off for very slow, very fast, or rhythmically complex pieces. Requires the Slow Down browser extension v1.1.0 or later (should update automatically, or grab the latest from the Chrome Web Store).

New dedicated Practice Tools area — a growing collection of tools to level up your practice sessions. Access it anytime from the dashboard. It's also available in the video player as a compact remote control.

A full-featured metronome with tap tempo, time signatures (2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 6/8, 7/8, and custom), subdivisions (quarter, eighth, triplet, sixteenth), multiple click sounds (classic, mechanical, woodblock, rimshot), swing control, accent/ghost/mute per beat, random mute for independence training, and a gradual tempo trainer that automatically increases BPM over time. Available standalone or as a compact remote control inside any video.