Practice Studio — User Guide

Everything the app does, in the order you are likely to need it. Each section is short on purpose: read the part you need, ignore the rest. If you are looking for a specific answer, the FAQ at the end covers the questions that come up most.

Getting started

Practice Studio is a practice room, not a single tool. The metronome and the tuner are what you open every day; scores, play-along, recording and the journal are there so that a practice session leaves a trace instead of disappearing.

Two things are worth knowing on day one:

• The metronome logs your practice by itself. Run it for at least a minute and the session is saved to the Journal with its tempo and length. You never have to press "save session".
• Nothing is destroyed. Recordings, scores and backing tracks stay on the device until you delete them explicitly.

Free vs Pro. The tuner, the metronome (click, subdivisions, accents, tempo trainer, timer, custom click sound) and Settings are free. Drums, Scores, Play Along, Piano, Projects, the Practice Journal, Stats and the custom groove editor are Pro.

Metronome

The dial

The big number is the tempo. Drag around the dial to change it, use − and + for one BPM at a time, and tap the number to type an exact value. The range is 1 to 300 BPM (the dial itself moves in whole BPM; typed and stepped values can be finer).

TAP sets the tempo by feel: tap it in time at least twice and the app averages your last taps (up to five). Stop tapping for two seconds and the next tap starts a fresh count.

START / STOP does what it says. While it runs, the beat dots above the dial light up one per beat.

Time signature

The 4/4 chip opens the meter. Pick a preset or set beats and note value yourself. The app is not limited to common meters: 5/4, 7/8, 12/8 and stranger things all work, and everything meter-dependent — the accent pattern, the count-in and the drum groove — reshapes itself to the new meter instead of breaking.

Subdivisions

The note-value chip sets what you hear between the beats:

Subdivision volume is separate from the main click, so you can keep the beat clear and the subdivisions quiet underneath — which is usually what you want.

Swing

Swing delays the off-beats. It applies to eighths and sixteenths; the triplet subdivision is already swung by definition, so the app tells you to switch to eighths or sixteenths if you try to swing it. The amount is continuous: nudge it a little for a lazy feel, push it to the end for a full triplet shuffle.

Accents — how they actually work

This is the part nobody explains, so here it is in full.

Each beat of the bar has an accent level, and the beat dots under the tempo are the control: tap a dot to cycle its level.

Tapping cycles up: 1 → 2 → 3 → 0 → 1… So tapping a beat "to accent it" accents it; keep tapping and it eventually goes silent, which is the point — see below. Tapping any dot also switches accents on automatically.

By default beat 1 is level 3 and every other beat is level 1: the ordinary "ONE two three four".

Turning Accents off in the settings panel ignores your pattern and plays a plain click, with the downbeat marked. Your pattern is not lost — turn accents back on and it returns.

Three things this is good for:

• Odd meters. In 7/8, accent 1 and 5 (or wherever the tune groups) and the bar suddenly reads as 2+2+3 instead of a blur of sevens.
• Practising the internal pulse. Mute beats 2 and 4 (level 0): you keep the tempo reference on 1 and 3 while your own time has to hold the rest. Mute more beats as it gets easy — this is the cheapest time-feel exercise there is.
• Backbeat work. Level 3 on 2 and 4, level 1 on 1 and 3.

When a beat is muted the app shows a small "a beat is muted (your accents)" note, so a silent beat is never mistaken for a bug.

Speed %

The SPEED chip plays at a percentage of the tempo on the dial. The dial keeps showing the piece's real tempo — useful when the target is 120 and you are working at 70% of it, because you can read both numbers at once. Tap the value to type an exact percentage.

Count-in

One bar before the click (or the drums) starts, in Voice (spoken numbers) or Sticks (drummer stick clicks). Long meters are counted the way they read: 7/8 comes out as "1 2 3 4 1 2 3".

Click sound

Settings → Metronome sound: Click, Wood, Main, Digital, Hi-hat, Kick, Sticks — plus your own. Tapping ▶ in that sheet previews the sound at 120 BPM without touching the transport.

Custom click. Upload your sample records a short hit with the microphone or imports a WAV/MP3, then you trim it on the waveform so the sound starts exactly on the attack (up to 2 seconds). The trimmed file becomes the click. If the metronome is running when you start recording, the app stops it first — otherwise the click would be recorded into your own sample.

Timer

The Timer chip counts down and stops the metronome when it reaches zero. Press Set to arm it instead of starting it immediately: armed, it waits and starts together with the metronome, so a 20-minute block begins when you actually begin playing.

Tempo trainer (Accelerator)

Two modes:

• Step — start at a tempo and add N BPM every N bars, up to a target. The classic way to take a lick from 80 to 120 without noticing.
• Ramp — glide continuously from start to target over a number of seconds.

One Way stops at the target; Loop turns around and comes back down, so you cycle between the two tempos indefinitely. Increment bell rings on the downbeat where the tempo changed, so you hear that you moved up without watching the screen.

The trainer starts from the tempo on the dial, and it never snaps: if you change a setting while it runs, it re-anchors to the tempo playing right now instead of jumping back to the start.

What gets logged

Run the metronome for at least 60 seconds and the session is written to the Journal — length, tempo reached, and the song it was attached to, if any. Under a minute, nothing is saved (so a quick tempo check doesn't pollute your history).

Drums

Drums replace the click with a real kit playing a groove, at the same tempo, with the same start/stop. Samples are a real kit, recorded and balanced hit by hit.

Styles

Rock, Funk, Dance, Blues, Swing (a four-bar jazz ride pattern that resolves across the phrase), plus Custom for your own.

Straight / Shuffle sets the feel. It means something in simple meters (x/4 and x/2); in /8 and /16 meters the pulse is the eighth, so the presets there stay straight. Each groove knows which note value it swings — Rock swings its eighths, the sixteenth-note grooves swing their sixteenths — so "Shuffle" always does the musically right thing rather than a blanket delay.

Change the time signature and the groove regenerates for the new meter, following the way that meter is normally grouped (5/4 as 3+2, 7/8 as 2+2+3, 12/8 as four dotted pulses…). You don't get a broken 4/4 pattern squeezed into 7 beats.

Drum volume vs click volume

Two separate faders:

• Drum volume — the kit.
• Click volume — the metronome click mixed under the kit. It starts at 0%, which is what most people want (kit only). If you want the click and the kit together — and this is also the only way to hear subdivisions while the drums play — raise this fader.

Custom grooves

The groove editor is a grid: lanes for kick, snare and hi-hat, one column per step. Tap a cell to cycle it: off → normal → accent → ghost. Save it with a name and it appears next to the built-in styles; long-press a custom groove to edit it again.

The hi-hat sound is chosen for you by context — the hat that lands with a kick, with a snare, on an off-beat sixteenth and on its own are four different samples. You place the hits; the app picks the right timbre.

Tuner

Point the tuner at the note and read the strobe: the note name, the deviation in cents and the frequency. The display dims when the signal is unclear, so you can tell "this reading is solid" from "I'm reading room noise".

• A4 reference is adjustable from 415 to 466 Hz — 440 standard, 432 if you prefer, and everything in between for playing with old instruments or recordings.
• Source: the app auto-detects connected inputs. The built-in mic is fine for everyday tuning but hears the room; for the tightest, sub-cent accuracy plug in an interface or a wired input and select it.

The tuner is deliberately honest with piano and other inharmonic instruments: the pitch is refined against the true fundamental instead of being pulled sharp by the stretched upper partials.

Scores

Your sheet music lives here, and the metronome is always in the pane next to it — the point is to read and play in time, not to switch apps.

What you can import: PDF, images (or a photo taken on the spot), Guitar Pro, MusicXML and iReal Pro charts. An iReal file that contains a whole playlist opens as a list, and you pick the song to import. Sibelius (.sib) and Dorico (.dorico) are closed formats no app can open — export MusicXML or PDF from those programs and import that.

Playback (Guitar Pro / MusicXML). The score plays back with the cursor following the music:

• Tracks — every track of the file with M/S (mute/solo) and an instrument override if the file's sound is wrong. Play a duet part alone, mute the melody and play it yourself.
• Tempo — play back at a percentage of the written tempo; the header shows both the original ♩ and what you are actually hearing.
• Key — transpose the chart.
• Tap to seek, drag to loop. Tap a bar to jump there; drag across bars to set a loop and tap outside it to clear.

Charts and sheet music can be filed into a project so a song keeps its chart, its backing track and its takes together.

Play Along

This is the room where you practise against a recording: load a backing track, slow it down, loop the hard bars, mute the instrument you want to play, and record yourself on top.

Loading a backing. An audio file, one of your recordings, a project backing track, or the audio extracted from a video — the app pulls the soundtrack out for you. Supported audio is WAV, AIFF, MP3, M4A/AAC and ALAC.

Tempo detection. The app estimates the track's tempo and offers it as the metronome BPM in one tap. Free-time or rubato material reads unreliably and the app says so instead of pretending.

Speed — 20% to 200%, pitch preserved. Pitch — ±12 semitones, plus fine micro-tuning in cents for tracks that aren't at A=440; Detect & fix to 440 measures the recording and corrects it for you.

Markers and loops. Drop labelled markers on the waveform, drag across the waveform to set a loop, tap outside to clear it.

Stems

Split into stems separates the backing into its parts — drums, bass, vocals and everything else — right on your device. Nothing is uploaded. The first split downloads the separation model once (~84 MB); after that it works offline. One song at a time.

Once split, the mixer lets you mute what you want to play yourself: kill the guitar and play the guitar part, or keep only drums and bass and be the whole front line. Speed, pitch and loop apply to the stem mix exactly as they do to the full track.

Recording over a backing

What you get depends on how you are listening, and the app tells you which mode you are in:

• Speaker — the microphone captures the backing and your playing together. Stop saves one complete recording.
• Wired headphones — only your instrument is recorded and you get a two-track session lined up with the backing (a real overdub).
• Bluetooth — refused for recording. Bluetooth latency is too high and too variable for anything to line up; use wired headphones or the speaker.

For click-synced recording, run Calibrate once in Settings (quiet room, speaker on, Bluetooth off): it measures the audio round-trip of your device so takes land exactly on the click.

Export the edited backing (with your speed, pitch and trims applied) as M4A, MP3, WAV, AIFF or Apple Lossless.

Recordings and Projects

Every take you record is kept in Recordings, with rename, notes and playback at 0.5×–1.5× with pitch preserved.

A Project collects the takes of one idea — plus its scores and its backing tracks. Deleting a project never deletes its takes: they move to Unfiled.

Practice Journal

The Journal is built so that it fills itself. You practise; it records.

• Songs you are learning, each with a current and a target BPM, a study phase (Memorizing, Speeding up, Refining, Review) and its own tempo history.
• Sessions logged automatically by the metronome and the recorder (60 seconds minimum), with time, length and tempo.
• Streak and weekly goal — set minutes and/or days per week in Settings and the week bar tracks them.
• For my lesson — write down what your teacher assigned, set the lesson day (weekly, every two weeks or one-off) and the app counts down to it.

Attach a song to the metronome and every session you run is filed under that song; leave it empty for free practice.

Stats

Total time per piece, how your pieces are distributed across study phases, and the BPM trend — each piece's progress toward its target tempo over time, for your three most-practised songs.

Piano

A full keyboard with note names (♯ or ♭ spelling, your choice), Grand and Electric Piano sounds, and the same A4 reference as the tuner. Above the keys, a staff writes down what you play so you can see the chord you just found.

A USB or Bluetooth MIDI keyboard connected to the device plays this piano from anywhere in the app.

On Home, the keyboard strip at the bottom is the same instrument in miniature: tap a key for a quick reference pitch, or open it full screen.

Settings — what each switch does

• Design — Classic, Modern or Vintage look.
• Minimal mode — hides everything except the tuner, the dial, ±1 and recording, for when the screen is a distraction.
• Metronome sound / Custom click sample — see Click sound.
• Count-in (one bar) — voice or sticks, before click or drums.
• Recording count-in (2s) — a short countdown before recording starts, so you have time to get back to the instrument.
• Recording latency / Calibrate — compensates your device's audio round-trip so recordings line up with the click.
• Tuning reference (A4) — shared by the tuner, the piano and score playback.
• Default BPM — the tempo the metronome starts at on launch.
• Vibrate on the beat — a pulse on the first beat of each bar.
• Weekly practice goal — minutes and/or days per week; 0 turns it off.
• Sync with iCloud — journal, songs, homework and goals sync between your iPhone and your Mac through your own iCloud, no account to create. Recordings and scores stay on each device.
• MIDI keyboard — pick the input device.

Platform differences

The app is the same on every platform, with a few honest exceptions:

• iCloud sync is iPhone ↔ Mac (Apple devices).
• Stem separation runs on iPhone, Mac and Android. On Windows the mixer is there but the separation engine is not wired up yet.
• The tuner's sub-cent mode needs a wired input; on the Windows build the tuner uses the browser's microphone path.
• Vibration exists only where the device has a haptic engine.

FAQ

I set eighths (or sixteenths) but with the drums on I only hear quarters.

Raise Click volume in the Drums panel. It starts at 0%, so with drums on you are hearing the kit alone; the subdivisions ride the click, and the click is muted. With the fader up you get both.

One beat of my bar is silent. Is it broken?

No — that beat's accent is at level 0 (muted). Tap its dot until it comes back. See Accents.

I turned accents off and lost my pattern.

It is still there. Accents off plays a plain click; switch them back on and your levels return exactly as you left them.

Why won't Swing do anything on the triplet subdivision?

Triplets are already a swung division. Choose eighths or sixteenths, then swing them.

My recording doesn't line up with the click.

Two usual causes: you are on Bluetooth (impossible to sync — use wired or the speaker), or the latency calibration has never been run. Settings → Recording latency → Calibrate, in a quiet room with the speaker on.

Where did my practice session go?

Sessions shorter than 60 seconds aren't saved. Anything longer is in the Journal under the song attached to the metronome, or as free practice if none was.

Can I use my own click sound?

Yes — Settings → Metronome sound → Upload your sample. Record a hit or import a file, then trim it so the sound starts on the attack.

How do I practise a hard bar of a recording?

Play Along → load the track → drag across the waveform to loop the bar → drop the speed to 60–70% (the pitch stays put) → raise it as it gets clean.

Does stem separation send my music anywhere?

No. It runs on your device. The only download is the separation model itself, once.

Can I change the meter mid-groove?

Yes. The accent pattern and the drum groove regenerate for the new meter following how that meter is normally grouped.

The tempo trainer jumped back to the start when I changed a setting.

It doesn't anymore. Changing a parameter while it runs re-anchors the ramp to the tempo playing right now.

What is Speed % for, if the dial already sets the tempo?

So you can keep the piece's tempo on the dial and practise at a percentage of it. You always see both numbers: the real tempo and what you are playing right now.