Free and open source
A free practice app for piano, guitar and drums that tells you what to learn next
Music Practice picks the one skill you are ready for tonight, explains why it matters before you drill it, and brings back everything you have already learned before it has a chance to fade. It runs in the browser and it knows what you are working on.
32
piano skills, in prerequisite order
36
electric guitar skills
20
drum skills, practice pad first
It answers the two questions that eat practice time
Most practice apps score how close you played to a reference recording, or hand you a streak for showing up. Neither one answers the question you actually have when you sit down, which is what to work on tonight, or the one you have three weeks later, which is what you learned and quietly forgot.
- A real prerequisite tree, not a level counter
- 32 piano skills, 36 guitar and 20 drums, each one gated behind the skills it genuinely depends on. Barre chords do not become your next lesson until fretboard note names and the open chords under them are actually learned, so the order you meet things in is the order they build in.
- Drills that step up once you have earned it
- Technique drills ladder by tempo. You start under speed and move up after a clean run at the one you are on, so speed sits on top of control instead of being guessed at.
- Spaced review, so nothing you learned rots
- Anything you have learned comes back at 1, 3, 7, and 14 days. Miss a week and the review queue tells you exactly what needs a refresher before you move on. Nothing resets and there is no streak to protect.
- Ear training that only asks what you have been taught
- A round can only use the intervals, chord qualities and progressions the tree has actually covered, so it is always something you have a real shot at rather than a guess at material from a lesson you have not reached.
- Plain language, all the way down
- Every musical term in a lesson is tappable for a plain explanation, so nothing you read assumes vocabulary nobody has given you yet. If a lesson cannot be followed by a total beginner reading it cold, it is not finished.
Pick an instrument
One curriculum engine, three instruments. Each keeps its own progress, so learning guitar does not disturb where you are on piano.
Piano
32 skills, from finding a note on the keyboard to reading a lead sheet and comping a first jazz change.
Electric guitar
36 skills, with a fretboard map, chord diagrams and a capo module that does the transposing maths for you.
Drums
20 skills for a practice pad, starting at grip and stick rebound and building through the rudiments.
Free, open source, and no account
Nothing here is held back. There is no account to create, nothing to install and no paywall in front of a lesson. Progress lives in your browser, so you can start in the next thirty seconds and it is still there tomorrow. If you want the same progress on a second device, an optional sign-in adds cloud sync on top of the same local data, and the app works completely without it.
The whole thing is open source under the MIT licence at github.com/astraedus/piano. Read exactly how the skill tree, the 1/3/7/14 day review scheduler and the ear-training gates work instead of taking any of the above on faith. Built by Diven for his own nightly practice, and released because a real curriculum should not need a subscription to exist.
Start tonight
A few questions about which instrument you are on and roughly where you are, then the app puts you at the first thing you are ready for. On piano, night one is Map the Keyboard: finding any note in under a second, before a single scale.
Or read more about why this exists and how it compares to the apps you have already tried.