FlowFrame
A practice suite that grows with you.
FlowFrame is a browser-based metronome, tuner, drone, and practice-tracking environment built around the way musicians actually work — programmable click tracks, harmonic support locked to rhythm, and analytics that turn every session into something you can learn from.
A frame, not a cage. Flexible enough to support exploration; firm enough to hold the work together.
Browser-based, zero setup
Built by a working performer & teacher
Used by ensembles including Alarm Will Sound
Growing through musician feedback
Why I made it
Practice lives on the line between boredom and overwhelm.
Push too hard and the metronome becomes an accusing tyrant. Coast too long and you start scrolling instead of shedding. Staying inside the flow channel — the place where challenge and skill rise together — demands a frame that grows with you.
I started building FlowFrame in January 2025 because I needed it. I wanted a tool that respected two mindsets at once: a training mindset — slow reps, subdivided clicks, tuner drones, careful notes on articulation and intonation — and a trusting mindset, where presence and intuition take over and muscle memory does its work. Paper journals couldn’t bridge them. Generic metronome and tuner apps treated rhythm and pitch as separate problems. I wanted one place that held both: rigorous enough for the training side, fluid enough for the trusting side.
What it does
Six tools, unified around your work
Programmable click tracks
A full-score metronome, not a single pulse. Build click tracks with shifting meters, tuplets, modulations, beat groupings, linear tempo changes, and the option to remove beat-1 emphasis. Program a piece once and live inside it.
Pitch drones & harmonies
Drones and full harmonies anchored to your click pattern, with just-intonation support so brass sections can feed on each other’s overtones instead of fighting equal temperament.
FlowTracker
Plan sessions, tag practice blocks, and record yourself with waveform display you can annotate. After every session, two complementary spaces: free-form experience notes for the trusting side, and a hard data log — heatmap, duration trends, tag distribution, tempo progress — for the training side.
FreeFlow
A timer for music ruled by seconds instead of bars. Drop personalized time markers, get countdowns to your cue, and (on phones) a vibration when it’s your moment. Built for pieces like John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds.
Pattern library & sharing
A growing public library of patterns crowdsourced from musicians solving the same rhythmic puzzles. Share any pattern with a link — no downloads, no zip files, no walking someone through your tempo map over text.
Educator linking
Turn assignments and feedback into an asynchronous dialogue. Teachers send patterns, students send recordings, both sides see the data. Practice tokens and streak mechanics keep the work moving between lessons.
In real life
How I’m using it right now
Daily streak with practice tokens. FlowTracker keeps me honest. Every five days of practice earns a token I can spend on a day off without losing my streak — a small mechanic that makes consistency feel doable.
Repertoire prep with shifting meters. For Alarm Will Sound’s performance of Hilda Paredes’s Abalorios at the Mizzou International Composer Festival, I built a click track with the meter changes and tuplet subdivisions baked in. The piece morphs from 8-over-2 to 9-over-2 across pages; FlowFrame turns that into something I can live inside, not chase.
Just-intonation chorale work. Practicing the chorale in the final movement of Mahler 2 ideally needs a brass section in the room. With FlowFrame’s just-intonation harmony engine, I can program the section voicing and rehearse the way the section should sound — overtones aligned, not fighting equal temperament.
FreeFlow for time-based pieces. John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds isn’t through-composed; players move through bird songs in time. Alan Pierson structured it as an hour-long cycle representing a day. FreeFlow’s time markers tell each player what to play, when, and when to exit.
Built with you
Some of the best parts weren’t mine to begin with.
The Bulk Editor came from my wife, the flutist Erin Lesser, watching her prep a pattern and saying “I wish I could change all these measures at once.” Pattern sharing by link came from Alan Pierson, asking the obvious question I hadn’t asked. The “remove beat-1 emphasis” feature came from listening to Ben Russell layer subdivisions during beta. Temperaments came from a conversation with Mark Dupere.
FlowFrame grows the way real practice tools should — through musicians solving real problems and telling me what’s missing. Multi-language support is in progress. If you’ve got an idea, send it: flowframe@flowframe.app.
Try it free at flowframe.app.
No download. No setup. Open it in a browser and start building patterns, tracking sessions, or hearing your section sing in just intonation.