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FlowFrame

Beyond the Click : Six Real-World Ways I’m Using FlowFrame Right Now

I built FlowFrame to scratch a very personal itch: a practice tool that could keep up with the way musicians actually work. Since then, the app has grown in directions I never imagined… mostly because my own playing, teaching, and ensemble life keep throwing it new challenges. Below is a quick tour of how FlowFrame shows up in my day-to-day musical world, from five-minute trombone warm-ups to 40-minute New-Music odysseys.

1. Getting in the minutes

Feature in focus: FlowTracker

I use FlowFrame’s FlowTracker features to stay honest with myself. With FlowTracker, I log every practice session—individual and ensemble. I keep notes on what I work on, link practice blocks to click tracks with pitch references, record myself, and tag my practice sessions.

With FlowTracker, I’ve created a streak of 83 days of practice (which is still going!). That visual reminder pushes me to get time in every day, even if it’s just a few minutes. FlowTracker gives you a “Practice Token” every five days that can be used to take a day off without losing your streak.

Within the Review view in FlowTracker, you can look back on your practice sessions, view notes you took and even listen to recordings you may have made.

Also, the Review view has a slew of charts that let’s you see how you’ve spent your practice time including a heat map to see which days you played the most/least quickly, a line chart that gives you a break down of how much time you spent playing on any given day, a “practice time distribution” chart that shows what percentage of your time was spent on which tags, and finally a tempo tracking chart to view how your tempos are progressing on the practice blocks you choose to track.

2. Warm-Ups

Feature in focus: Practice Tools

Warming up is a time for me to focus and ease into playing. I want to meet myself where I am both physically and mentally. I load a steady drone, activate mute random beats and mute random harmony, and let FlowFrame remove reference points unpredictably. Those silent pockets force my ears (and slide) to hold the center without support. When the harmony snaps back in, I know instantly whether my internal pitch engine is firing or sputtering.

It’s like practicing with a teacher who occasionally walks out of the room just to see if you’re still singing in tune.

Playing scales and simple melodies in all keys is also part of my daily routine. I’m particularly

3. Repertoire preparation

ExcerptFeatures in FocusWhy It Helps
Abalorios by Hilda ParedesFull piece click track + tupletsHelps me feel the continuously changing meters and subdivisions
Mahler 2 ChoraleJust-intonation harmonyHelps the brass section feed on each other’s overtones instead of fighting equal temperament

For this year’s Mizzou International Composer Festival, Alarm Will Sound is performing Abalorios by Hilda Paredes, a challenging work with frequently shifting meters and subdivisions that morph from 8 over 2 to 9 over 2. To speed up my practice, I created a click track with all the information I need, meter changes and subdivisions.

FlowFrame pattern from Hilda Paredes’ Abalorios

The Fox Valley Symphony ended our season with Mahler’s Second Symphony. The chorale in the final movement is best practiced with a brass section, but getting folks together for that is a bit challenging. With FlowFrame, I was able to program in the harmony for the section, select “Just Intonation” and practice with all the voices.

The chorale from last movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony

4. The “Slow-to-Fast” Challenge Piece

Feature in focus: Tempo changes

A student was preparing a work for the Soundscapes Festival in Switzerland that accelerates from QN = 60 → 144 over two pages. Traditional metronomes can’t do that and it’s challenging to do on a DAW. FlowFrame’s linear tempo change option lets us chart the entire glide in one line, so they can live inside the acceleration instead of chasing it.

5. Wilson’s Double-Bass Concerto, Mvt III

Feature in focus: Beat groupings

Time-signatures here read like phone numbers: 7/8, 9/8, 5/8 with sub-groupings 3+2+2 then 2+3+2… you get the picture. We programmed each bar (copy-paste is your friend) and let the grouping accents light up the sideways pulse. What used to be a bar-line guessing game is now muscle memory.

6. Birding with John Luther Adams

Feature in focus: FreeFlow

John Luther Adams’ Ten Thousand Birds is not a traditional through-composed piece. Players are provided a folio of bird songs which can be played in any order. Alan Pierson, Alarm Will Sound Artistic Director, has structured these songs into an hour-long cycle representative of a day. To keep players on track, we used FlowFrame’s FreeFlow feature.

The FreeFlow time map for John Luther Adams’ Ten Thousand Birds.

With FreeFlow, users can personalize their Time Markers however they like (e.g. with what song they need to play at a particular time or when they exit). They’ll then receive a countdown to their marker (and a vibration on their phone if they click the bell icon).

Your Turn

If any of these use-cases ring a bell, fire up flowframe.app and recreate them or invent your own. And if you discover a wild corner case that FlowFrame doesn’t handle yet, drop me a note. That’s how the next feature gets born.

Happy tracking, clicking, droning, ramping, and, most of all, music-making.

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Uncategorized

Built for Progress: Practice Tracking in FlowFrame

When I started sketching out FlowFrame, it wasn’t just about building a better metronome; it was about creating a space where practice tracking could feel focused, intentional, and rewarding. A place where structure meets flexibility, and where your growth is something you can actually see.

One of the ways FlowFrame supports that is through its practice tracking system. I use it every day, and I figured it might be helpful to show you what that looks like.

Practice Tracking with FlowFrame

Start with a Plan

When I sit down to practice, I open FlowFrame on my phone (though it works just as well on desktop or tablet). I head to the Practice Planner and sketch out a rough outline for the session (or use one I’ve created in advance). Blocks for buzzing, technique work, repertoire—whatever I’m focusing on that day.

Each block gets a label, a projected time, maybe a tempo goal, and a few tags. The tags aren’t just for show; they feed into the analytics later, helping me see how my time gets distributed across different focus areas. (Spoiler: I spend more time on ensemble work than I thought.)

You can also link click tracks to each block. So if I’m running a tricky excerpt from Alarm Will Sound repertoire, I can pull up a custom FlowFrame click with shifting meters and accelerandos baked right in. No fiddling with external apps or cobbled-together solutions. It’s all there.

Practice, Review, Repeat

Once I’m ready, I tap “Start,” and the session begins. If I want, I can record myself. FlowFrame captures the audio and displays a waveform, which I can slow down, annotate with comments or markers, and revisit later.

At the end of the session, FlowFrame prompts a few reflection questions. I’ve customized mine to ask things like, “What surprised me today?” or “What’s something I want to revisit tomorrow?” I don’t always write a novel, but jotting a quick note helps me stay engaged.

Why It Matters

All that data (tags, tempo progress, time spent, reflections) gets saved and visualized in the Review section. It’s not about gamifying practice (though I won’t lie, the confetti is satisfying). It’s about helping you stay connected to the why behind the work.

It’s easy to get lost in the daily grind of practice. FlowFrame helps zoom out, spot patterns, and adjust. Am I neglecting scales? Have I made real progress on that etude? Did I actually do what I said I’d do?

Now I can answer those questions.

Built with You

As always, FlowFrame’s still growing. Many of the improvements come from conversations with musicians who’ve shared what they need and what’s missing in their practice lives. If you’ve got thoughts, I’m listening.

Let me know what you think, or better yet, log in, build a plan, and start tracking.

Your future self will thank you.

Categories
Feature FlowFrame Practice

There’s No One Right Way to Make Music

If there’s a single belief that’s guided the development of FlowFrame, it’s this:
There is no one right way to make music.

Not in how you compose it.
Not in how you teach it.
Not in how you practice it.

Music is shaped by bodies, communities, values, traditions, physics and always by personal taste. The goal of FlowFrame isn’t to enforce a method. It’s to provide a structure that helps you pursue your own.

That means building a tool that adapts to what you need, whether you’re grounding yourself in the overtone series, navigating tempo curves, or improvising with harmonies that fall outside Western tuning.

Here are some of the ways FlowFrame supports that idea.

Flexible Time and Pulse

  • Metric Modulations: A quarter note from a quarter note triplet can become the eighth note of the next measure, no math required.
  • Tuplets and Nested Tuplets: Build rhythmic structures as intricate (or simple) as the music demands.
  • Subdivisions up to 12: Layer up to five different subdivisions on a single beat to mirror complex rhythmic feels.
  • Beat Groupings: Customize how measures are grouped and accented—useful for everything from Bulgarian dance music to expressive rubato.

Pitch, Drone, and Harmony—Your Way

  • Drones: Pitch-stable practice with variable A tuning (adjustable in cents).
  • Preset Harmonies: Select from built-in chord types or stack your own.
  • “Any Note” Drones: Choose from four octaves to create exactly the harmonic environment you want.
  • Just Intonation (and other temperaments) + Reference Pitch: Tune every note relative to any pitch center you define.
  • Overtone Series-Tuned Drones: Build practice tools aligned to the physics of sound.
  • Quarter-Tone Support: Explore microtonality and expressive intonation without needing external synths or plugins.

Time-Event Music? There’s a Frame for That Too.

Some music isn’t measured in beats at all—it’s structured by seconds, not measures. For that, there’s FreeFlow, FlowFrame’s time-event framework.

Use it to:

  • Rehearse or perform works coordinated by stopwatch instead of barlines
  • Trigger cues with clock precision
  • Synchronize players in pieces where pulse is irrelevant or intentionally absent

So What Is FlowFrame, Really?

It’s not just a metronome.
It’s not just a tuner.
It’s not just a tracker.

It’s a practice framework, designed to grow with you, not to tell you how to play.

Whether you’re a classical flutist fine-tuning your vibrato to a just-tuned drone, an experimental violinist redefining pulse, or a teacher building patterns for your students, the point is this:

You don’t need to change your music to fit the tool.
The tool should meet you where you are and open new possibilities from there.