tuneUPGRADE News

Forming a great practice routine can be challenging. You only have so much time to practice in a day, and out of context statements such as "I heard musician X practices scales 2 hours a day! Should I be doing that?" can lead you to forming routines that don't work for you. Sure, scale practice is very important - but before you sit down and spend a practice session on scales, consider that a practice routine should have the following four phases. The Four Phases of a Practice Routine Simply put, a practice routine should factor in these four phases: Exercises for warming up and focusing on techniques or concepts you want to master Tunes you're learning  for building up your repertoire, consistently adding difficulty to grow your skills Repertoire review  for ensuring tunes you already know don't grow stale Open practice time  to play whatever you want to enjoy yourself and keep your interest. Depending on what your current goal is, the amount of time spent in ea

Spotify Connector Now Available! Hey all, hot on the heels of the YouTube connector, you can now select and embed spotify tracks into tuneUPGRADE to play them back while practicing while using in a desktop web browser. Play along with songs or pick some backing tracks. Mobile may have mixed results, as Spotify requires you to play tracks within the spotify app on mobile. Here's how it works: from the add/edit tune screen, scroll down to the Spotify Connector and click 'Select from Spotify': If you've already filled out a title and artist, you'll see the top results on Spotify, ready for you to play back or preview. Make sure to log in with your spotify account when prompted to hear the full song. If the track you want isn't listed, you can search on your own as well using the search box at the top. Click 'Select' to pick the right track for your tune. Now, when practicing, you can click the 'Spotify' button to fly out the embedded track and play

Youtube Connector Now Available! You can now drop a youtube link in the YouTubeURL field when creating editing a song, and tuneUPGRADE will embed the YouTube video into the practice screen for you. It can be shown and hidden with the 'YouTube' button.  Drop me a note at [email protected] to report any issues or if you've had a positive experience! Note that some youtube videos are not able to be embedded, blocked on the YouTube side, and in this case, I recommend you use the general link field for these. Pro Tips You can speed up and slow down youtube videos without affecting pitch  of a track. Use this to your advantage to slow down difficult backing tracks to play along with. Simply adjust the speed down to .75 or .5 to hear what's going on or to play along while learning! Don't stop at framing in songs alone - frame in your favorite exercise videos, theory videos, or teaching videos and track your time learning as well. Look out for an upcoming feature - Spot