Woodshed - Practice Assistant

Three Amazing Apps in One! A ledger to keep track of assignments and practice times, a musical notation playback scratchpad for exercises and warmups, and a conducting metronome, to instill musical expression over mechanical execution.

A great combination to help you practice better and more efficiently.
• Lessons - A place to write down your lesson assignments and record your practice times between lessons with the built-in stopwatch.
• Exercises - Create and play along with your own musical exercises.
• Maestro - An audible and VISUAL metronome that inspires musical expression rather than mechanical execution.

Lessons:
Keep a record of your assignments for each lesson and easily record your practice times between lessons. ‘Add Next Lesson’ copies the current assignments to a new entry for easy editing.
Start, Pause, Resume the stopwatch and when youre done, select Save to automatically have it added to the list of practice times, tagged with the current date.

Exercises:
After notating an exercise, you can instantly transpose it to another clef and root note, keeping its theoretical relationships; Fb tonic will have a Bbb as its fourth scale degree, a Bbbb if it’s a lowered fourth, Bb if it’s raised.
• Selecting your instrument’s key (Ab, Eb, Bb, F, C, G, D, A, or E) invites you play along by transposing the notation while playing back the concert pitches.
• Long Press a note to edit the exercise. Add, insert or subtract notes and rests, change a note to a rest or a rest to a note, or just change its duration.
• Change a notes pitch by touching and dragging it on the staff. Using the piano keyboard will change whatever is already selected in the notation.
• Lock the exercise to keep from inadvertently editing it as you swipe to scroll or pinch to zoom in and out.
• Saved exercises appear in a list with their name and a note to help you identify them when you tap on the title ‘Exercises.’
• Set the tempo and if it loops: with each repeat it can transpose up or down, (m2, M2, m3, M3, P4, and tritone) or not at all.
• Adjustable metronome volume with 0, 2, or 4 beat count-off. (Off while playing the exercise still clicks during the count-off.)

- Using the Staff (transposed for the current instrument): Drag the note up and down to change the pitch diatonically based on the current root, drag right to raise and left to lower it a half step. Drag up and down to the right or left of the written note to keep the alterations as you drag.
- Using the Piano (concert pitch): Swipe to move the keyboard, tap to play notes, touch & hold then slide to glissando. When you glissando up, notes will be raised, when you glissando down, lowered.

Maestro:
An audible and VISUAL metronome that inspires musical expression rather than mechanical execution. When practicing with this metronome, the animated beat patterns will reinforce the peripheral vision used when following a conductor.

Be able to practice without the click, while keeping to a strict tempo. Always know where you are INSIDE the beat with the traditional musical beat patterns developed over ages of musical performance practice, not an arbitrary circle for all meters and styles.

Double tap to start. Swipe horizontally or pinch to stop.
Long Press triggers Tap Tempo, tap anywhere more than twice to set the tempo. Then wait and it will start conducting.

• Adjust the tempo, 10 to 240 bpm, by dragging up/down anywhere, using the + & - buttons, or by tapping via Tap Tempo
• 31 different beat patterns: 1 through 12(3+3+3+3)
• Staccato, Neutral, Legato, and Reduced (see below) pattern styles from the Performers or Conductors Point of View
• Optional 2, 3, or 4 subdivisions of the beat
• 0, 1, or 2 pick-up beats (get playing quicker)

The Reduced style:
At faster tempos, a legato 3 pattern turns into a one pattern while still clicking the three beats. A 6(2+2+2) changes into 3 while a 6(3+3) changes into 2 while still clicking 6 beats.