Marco I don’t think you’re going to get much of a response coming to a forum peddling an app without as much as an introduction, a little about yourself, how long you’ve been learning from Justin.
For all we know your just trying to data mine the members of the community
Hi Rick. Thanks for the friendly note. I’m from Toronto, but live in Portland, and have been a fan of Justin’s for some time now, definitely pre-2020. One of his lessons was try to learn to read music, and ever since I’ve gotten more and more into classical guitar.
I’ve only started to see some real progress once I found a teacher. One thing I regret was not getting one sooner. That and not learning the notes on the fretboard on day 1.
Anyway, Justin’s all about splitting your practice into two halves, with half the time on technique, half the time on whatever you want, and to spend 5 min on various exercises (remember the lesson with the vegemite jar and the picks?) so I used to write them out in a book at the beginning of the week, but that was a drag, so I stopped, and my organization dropped off, and my practice suffered. This app makes it a lot easier. And makes recording yourself a lot easier too.
I always got satisfaction from others using code I made public (e.g., as an astronomer at Caltech and Stanford), so that’s all this is. I hope people will find it useful.
Hi Marco. I think this is pretty cool. One point: you might edit your initial post to clearly state that this is a MacOS app. Your GH repo for it looks well structured and documented but diving into that might be intimidating for those who are versed in how GH works.
Looking at your screenshots I have to ask what “Q Strengthening” is.
You’re right. I split it into similar, if not identical areas,
technique
knowledge
songs
ear training
time/rythm
You can also filter for classical or electric (e.g., no bend in tune for nylon string guitar).
You can manually add more sections and exercises in the exercises.toml file, but for that there are some extra steps to get it running with the new file.
Hi David, I’ll try the edit as you suggested. I’ve gotten similar feedback from my local guitar salon (windows users). It might actually work fine in windows (I’ve yet to test it), but there is no stand-alone app at the moment.
Q is the pinky finger (I think!, PIMA are thumb, index, middle, and ring.)
I’m not a coder so I’ve no opinion about running it under Windows; it might require some adaptation of directories, etc. (e.g., the “~/.whatever” doesn’t result in a hidden folder there). Mostly I’m suggesting adding some basic info to the post here so that folks have some idea of what they’re getting into when they go to GH. Looking over the repo I like the way you’ve set up the exercises to be easily configurable. Do I correctly gather that editing the exercises.toml file is the only way to configure them?
Yes, that’s correct exercises.toml to modify what’s in the Planner. If you do edit it, however, you’ll need to either rebuild the app (./build_app.sh), or run it from a terminal (uv run guitar-practice) and open it in a browser window (http://localhost:8050). It’s pretty easy if you are familiar with this kind of thing, but not so easy if you dont!
It seems like I can’t edit posts after some time? So hopefully people read this far.
Another roadblock is that the when you first double click the app you will get the message
“Guitar Practice Studio can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software”. The solution is go to Systems Settings → Privacy and Security, to say you trust the app. Otherwise running it from the terminal is your only option I’m afraid…
