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.
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.
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.
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.
