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.
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.
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.
Sharing Patterns by Link
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.
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.
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.
Time is the raw material of every practice session. When I began building FlowFrame in January 2025 I was staring down four uncertain years and trying to decide how I would make it through them. I anticipated many uncomfortable feelings…
To deal with these, I determined the best path for me was to take it one day at a time, one activity at a time. I started setting goals: health and wellness, musical/artistic, family and social, scholarly, etc. That attitude became the backbone of the app and of my own routine.
Two verbs kept circling my mind:
experience — the qualitative, subjective swirl of the present
divide — the quantitative habit of chopping moments into measurable units
Holding both at once is tricky, yet musicians have to. Enter the pair of concepts that guides all of my work: the training mindset and trusting mindset.
Training ↔︎ Trusting
Note: when I talk about “practice,” I’m talking about the deliberate, repeatable engagement with a task (guided by feedback and reflection) undertaken to turn effort into embodied skill, insight, and character. Like someone practices yoga or a religion or music.
My practice philosophy involves two mindsets and an awareness of which is predominant:
Training – conscious effort, measurement, repetition, slow metronome clicks, tuner drones, detailed notes on articulation and intonation.
Trusting – presence, intuition, reacting in real time, “playing with my eyes,” letting muscle and memory do their jobs.
My goal is 1) to spend more time in the trusting mindset so it is the one I default to in times of stress, but 2) to spend enough time in the training mindset that the instincts I fall back on are grounded in efficiency.
An example is cooking.
When I’m learning a brand-new recipe I put on my training hat: I weigh the flour to the gram, set timers for every stage of the roux, and write little reminders like “whisk constantly or it will scorch.” But once I’ve made that dish a half-dozen times, I flip to trusting mode. Now I can feel when the sauce thickens, eyeball salt, and taste-adjust on the fly while chatting with my kids. The meal still ends up on the table, but the path there feels completely different (and a lot more alive) because the hard measurements have already been internalized.
How I used to structure my musical work
Count back from the performance date. If I had six weeks, week one was nothing but slow reps: half-tempo, subdivided clicks, tuner drones, isolated intervals… absolutely everything under the microscope.
Build the piece brick by brick. • Loop small fragments until they felt physical. • Gradually string fragments into phrases, phrases into sections. • Nudge the metronome up a couple of BPM only after the previous tempo felt automatic.
Transition to performance mode. A certain amount of time out from the performance, I’d accept the technique I had and start running the work in full takes, exactly as I’d play it on stage: no pausing, no stopping for something missed. I’d record those run-throughs, note the spots where nerves crept in, then run mini-concerts for friends. The goal was to habituate my nervous system to “show time” so that, when the real concert arrived, the trusting mindset was already warmed up.
Why paper journals stopped cutting it
Handwritten logs were better than nothing, but they had real drawbacks:
Hard to search. I could never remember whether that magical practice breakthrough happened in the green notebook or the black one.
No big-picture view. It’s impossible to spot three months of tempo creep or a week-long slump by flipping pages.
Zero backup. One spilled coffee or lost backpack and an entire season of notes disappears.
No prompts or reminders. A blank page doesn’t ask you if you pushed comfort zones or hit your weekly hour goal.
Data silos. Metronome markings, timer totals, repertoire lists, and reflection notes all lived in different margins.
I wanted a single place that honored both mindsets: rigorous enough for “training me,” fluid enough for “trusting me.”
Enter FlowFrame’s Review system
FlowFrame’s Review tab grew directly out of that need. After every session you get two complementary spaces:
Experience notes (Trusting). A free-form textbox for anything subjective: “felt weightless in the coda,” “right hand tense during arpeggios,” “lost track of breathing when the kids ran through the room.” Tie sensations to exact practice sessions.
Data log (Training). Behind the scenes FlowFrame captures the hard numbers:
Practice Heatmap – a calendar view that color-codes days by total minutes so you see at a glance where the streaks and gaps are.
Duration Trends – a rolling graph of daily, weekly, and monthly totals, perfect for spotting over-practice risk or under-practice ruts.
Tag Distribution – every practice block can be tagged (e.g., “Lip Slurs,” “Bach 2,” “Mindfulness”). The distribution wheel shows exactly where your time is going.
Tempo Progress – FlowFrame stores the start and end tempo for every click-based drill, then plots your fastest comfortable tempo over time. Watching that line climb is ridiculously motivating.
Because all of that lives in the same place, you can click any heat-box or tag slice and instantly open the subjective notes you wrote that day. “Oh, that was the session where I discovered the alternate slide position. No wonder the tempo jumped.”
Why this matters
The Review system turns practice into a feedback loop:
Plan – set tomorrow’s goals based on today’s data.
Act – track in real time while the metronome, drones, or timer run.
Reflect – jot how it felt, what surprised you, what to tweak.
Adapt – let the heatmap and graphs reveal patterns you can’t feel in the moment.
Little by little, the training mindset inputs get converted into trusting mindset instincts, exactly the balance I was chasing when I started FlowFrame in that chilly January of 2025.
