I had a small epiphany today about Land of Winter (Donnacha Dennehy’s large-scale work for chamber orchestra, written for and recorded by Alarm Will Sound.).
The piece, in many ways, deals with misunderstandings.
Donnacha often talks about how the Romans called Ireland Hibernia: the “Land of Winter.” From a distance, it must have seemed perpetually cold, grey, and forbidding. But anyone who has actually spent time there knows that’s not quite true. It’s temperate. Changeable. More about light than cold, and about how radically that light transforms across the year. From what I understand (I haven’t spent much time in Ireland!), at the height of winter and summer, those shifts can feel genuinely extreme.
But the name stuck, even if the reality didn’t quite fit.
Something similar happens every time I describe Land of Winter to people.
When I say it’s by an Irish composer, there’s often an almost imperceptible mental pivot: fiddles, reels, Riverdance, traditional Irish music. None of that is wrong, exactly, but none of it really applies here either. Dennehy’s music lives in a very different sound world, one shaped by spectral harmony, electronics, and contemporary classical techniques, even as a deep sense of place quietly informs the piece in ways that resist anything overtly “traditional.”
And yet, those assumptions are understandable. We all reach for familiar reference points. We label things quickly so we know how to listen, what to expect, how to place them in a mental box.
Land of Winter quietly resists that. It asks for a slower kind of listening. It’s less about postcard images of Ireland and more about time passing, light changing, seasons overlapping. It’s not winter as a stereotype, but winter as a lens. Something you look through rather than something you endure.
Maybe that’s what keeps pulling me back to the piece. It lives in the gap between expectation and experience. Between the name and the reality. Between what we think we’re hearing and what’s actually there if we stay with it long enough.
And maybe that’s true of more things than just this piece of music.
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
Excerpt
Features in Focus
Why It Helps
Abalorios by Hilda Paredes
Full piece click track + tuplets
Helps me feel the continuously changing meters and subdivisions
Mahler 2 Chorale
Just-intonation harmony
Helps 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.
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.
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.
