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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.

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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.

Categories
Feature FlowFrame Music Practice

Built With You: How FlowFrame Grows Through Your Ideas

One of the best parts of building FlowFrame has been seeing it evolve not just from my ideas, but from user-suggested features.

Some of my favorite features weren’t in the original plan. They came from musicians I admire, collaborators I trust, and friends who use FlowFrame in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

The Bulk Editor

This one came from my wife, Erin Lesser, an extraordinary flutist, teacher, and someone with an uncanny ability to spot inefficiencies. Watching her prep a pattern one day, she said:

“I wish I could change all these measures at once.”

She was right.

The bulk editor, a user-suggested feature added to FlowFrame.

So we built the Bulk Editor, a way to create multiple measures with meter, easily. It saves time and reduces friction, which means more focus on the music itself.

This one came from Alan Pierson, a dear friend and artistic compatriot at Alarm Will Sound. He asked a simple question:

“Could I just share a pattern with someone by sending them a link?”

The answer, at the time, was no. But it should’ve been yes.
Now it is.

Link sharing, another user-suggested feature added to FlowFrame.

You can share any FlowFrame with a link. No downloads, no zip files, no need to walk someone through your tempo map over text. Just click, copy, send. It’s a small shift that opens the door to faster collaboration and deeper creative exchange, something Alan has always championed in his own work.

Remove Beat 1 Emphasis

During beta testing, I had the chance to hear Ben Russell play with FlowFrame. He was exploring rhythm: layering subdivisions, shifting feels, creating something intricate and propulsive.

But I noticed something: the emphasized downbeat (useful for many) was getting in the way of the rhythmic patterns he was trying to bring out.

That moment led to the “Remove Beat 1 Emphasis” feature. Now, you can turn off the default downbeat click and build patterns where every beat carries equal weight or where the emphasis comes entirely from the player, not the tool.

De-emphasizing beat one, a user-suggested feature added to FlowFrame.

What’s Next

These features didn’t come from a roadmap, they came from real musicians solving real problems. User-suggested features are how FlowFrame will continue to grow.

I’m currently working on a feature to allow creating and sharing recordings. And I just had a conversation with my dear friend Mark Dupere regarding adding temperaments to the tuning options. This summer, I’m working on multi-language support, so that FlowFrame can be more accessible to musicians around the world. And beyond that, I’ll keep listening to your feedback, your frustrations, and your ideas.

If you’ve got one, send it my way at flowframe [at] flowframe [dot] app. Some of the best parts of this tool weren’t mine to begin with.