Hello,
The Practice Assistant invites feedback and suggestions, so here are mine.
-
Please make the list of practice items you can add from the website available in one list on a tab somewhere in Practice Assistant. I understand that you might not want users to have to scroll through a list of all items every time they make a routine, but it’s so inconvenient to try to find the lesson where a particular exercise is and add that to practice items, or to manually type in like a million different variations of one-minute changes, even with the “Duplicate” tool.
-
Routines are very clunky and inconvenient. My practice varies day to day and it defeats the purpose of the routine mechanism to create a new one each day. I would create a tab like “Today’s Practice” where you could add practice items or (editable) routines to your list for the day. Routines would be more like templates or exercises that are commonly grouped together; you could add them to your day’s practice and then edit them. So I might have a daily routine that included finger gym, one-minute changes, perfect changes, scales, and two songs; I could put that in Today’s Practice and then change, e.g., the one-minute change from A-D to A-E for that day and pick a different song. This would be even more useful if you take a suggestion below to allow practice items to be categorized or tagged, or if you implemented a practice routine suggestion engine type of thing.
-
Speaking of which, a flat, one-field practice item list isn’t a very functional approach. It’s flexible, sure, but it’s not helpful for identifying what kinds of items are available to develop the skills I want to improve. So in my own hand-rolled practice assistant that I’ve made on Google sheets, I have fields for each item called Skill Focus that’s populated with general categories like Finger Independence, Chord Speed, Chord Accuracy, Finger Stretching, Strumming, etc. I have general practice item names for the kind of exercise it is (e.g., One-Minute Changes, Scales, Spider) and then another field for specific variations of that exercise (e.g., A-D, C Major). I can pick daily exercises using drop-down lists. So every day I can make sure I’m doing an exercise or two that builds all the kinds of skills I want to improve, but I’m not stuck with the same one every day, giving me a lopsided development (for example, before I rolled my own assistant, I used the JG app routines, so I can change from D-F quite easily but can’t get to F from anywhere else). I’m thinking about whether a tag system would be better for this, but that’s harder for me to do and I’m not sure it would be any better.
I think a reasonably competent intern could do all three of the above things and it would make the assistant way more helpful and powerful. Further down the line, you might think about automated suggestions for what items to include for each day, based on the lessons you’ve done, the prior weeks’ practices, items you haven’t looked at in a while, items you’re lagging on in your stats, etc. But that’s a much more complicated overhaul. In the meantime, I’d love to just have a little more flexibility as described.