Blog
The handbook
Practice tips
Deliberate practice, SMART goals, ear training, memory, and getting unstuck. Written from a guitarist's desk, but the thinking works on any instrument.
Show your work
Share your practice
Turn a week, a month or a year of practice into a card you can post. The proof that the hours actually happened.
How to practice
The craft itself: tempo, focus, routine, progress. Any instrument.
How to practice with a Drone for Better Intonation
The oldest intonation tool there is, and the one most people skip. What to set it to, what to listen for, and why your major thirds are the first thing to go.
8 min read
How to Practice With a Metronome
Where to set the click, when to move it up, why you keep losing it, and the muted-strings trick that trains timing before technique gets in the way.
9 min read
Why Slow Practice Works
Speed is a by-product of accuracy, not a separate skill. What slow practice is actually doing to your playing, how slow to go, and how to climb back up.
7 min read
How Long Should You Practice Every Day?
The honest answer: less than you think, more often than you're managing. What focused time buys you at each level, and what to do with a five-minute day.
7 min read
How to Build a Consistent Practice Routine
Routines don't fail from laziness. They fail from setup friction and a fried brain at 9pm. Here's how to build one that survives a long day.
8 min read
Why Every Musician Should Keep a Practice Journal
Progress is too slow to feel and too easy to forget. Three lines a session fixes both. Here's what to write, with a template you can copy.
7 min read
Why Recording Yourself Makes You Improve Faster
Your ears while playing and your ears while listening are two different ears. A thirty-second recording is the cheapest teacher you'll ever hire.
6 min read
Why You've Stopped Improving
Plateaus are almost never a talent ceiling. They're a repetition problem: you've been rehearsing what you can already do. Here's how to tell, and how to break it.
8 min read
How to Listen Back to Your Own Playing
Recording is the easy half. Listening is a skill, and listening for everything at once is how people learn nothing from a take they hated.
7 min read
A 10-Minute Warm-Up That Actually Does Something
Most warm-ups are just quiet practice. A real one wakes up the hands, sets the ear, and tells you what kind of day it is, in ten minutes flat.
6 min read
How to Practice Polyrhythms and Odd Time
3 against 2, 4 against 3, and bars of 7 that stop feeling like maths. Count the composite, then throw the counting away.
8 min read
How to Practice for Performance Nerves
Nerves don't make you worse at playing. They make you worse at recovering. That's a thing you can practice, and almost nobody does.
7 min read
Practicing with video
The YouTube workflows: slow it down, loop the hard bar, run a click over it, change the key.
How to practice Guitar with YouTube: Full Setup
The whole session, start to finish: tune, set the click, slow the passage, loop it, and keep a record. Works for any instrument, not just guitar.
10 min read
How to Slow Down a YouTube Video to Practice
The built-in speed menu, the keyboard shortcut nobody uses, and how to slow a passage past 0.25× without it sounding underwater.
6 min read
How to Loop Part of a YouTube Video (A–B Repeat)
YouTube's own loop only repeats the whole video. Here are three ways to repeat just the four bars you keep missing.
6 min read
How to Run a Metronome Over a YouTube Video
Play along to a lesson with a click on top of it, including how to find the video's BPM and get a metronome in the same window.
5 min read
How to Change the Key of a YouTube Video
Transpose a song into your range or tuning, plus a semitone chart for every capo position and common alternate tuning.
7 min read
How to Make a Backing Track From Any Song
What vocal removal can and cannot actually do, why the result sounds watery, and how to get a usable practice track out of a song you already own.
7 min read
Tools
What to use, and what each one is actually for.
Free Online Metronome for Music Practice
A metronome you can use on this page right now, plus what to look for in one (subdivisions, accents, tempo ramps) and why a browser tab is a bad place to keep it.
6 min read
Free Online Tuner for Guitar and 20+ Instruments
How browser tuners work, why yours reads the wrong string, and what to do when the note is right but the chord still sounds wrong.
7 min read
How to Read a Tuner: Which Way to Turn
The number, the needle, and the note name: what each one is telling you, and how to know whether you are sharp or flat without guessing.
6 min read
Metronome BPM Chart: Tempo Markings Explained
Largo to prestissimo with real BPM ranges, the modifiers that bend them, and a metronome on the page so you can hear any tempo you just read about.
6 min read
Tuning & pitch
Getting to the right note first: guitar, bass, ukulele, violin, and the reference behind all of them.
How to Tune a Guitar (With or Without a Tuner)
E A D G B E, the fifth-fret method, the harmonics method, and why the B string is the one that always ends up wrong.
8 min read
Alternate Guitar Tunings: A Practical Guide
Drop D, DADGAD, open G, open D and the rest: what each one is for, what it costs you, and how to get back to standard without a broken string.
9 min read
How to Tune a Ukulele
G C E A, why the top string is higher than the one below it, and what to do about strings that will not stay put for the first fortnight.
6 min read
How to Tune a Violin
G D A E in perfect fifths, when to use the pegs and when to use the fine tuners, and how to tune to a drone the way the orchestra does.
6 min read
How to Tune a Bass Guitar
E A D G an octave below the guitar, which is exactly why your tuner keeps lying to you about the bottom string. Plus drop D and five-string.
6 min read
A4 = 440 Hz: What Your Tuner's Reference Does
The number every tuner has a setting for and almost nobody touches. What it means, when 442 or 415 is the right answer, and the 432 argument.
7 min read
Training your ear
Playing what you can hear: finding the key, taking a song apart, working without tab.
How to Find the Key of a Song by Ear
Hum the note the song wants to end on. That's usually it. Here's how to confirm it, tell major from minor, and handle the songs that lie to you.
8 min read
How to Learn a Song by Ear, Step by Step
Bass line first, not the melody. The order you work in decides whether this takes twenty minutes or a weekend of guessing.
9 min read
Also on this site
- Practice Player: slow down, loop, and transpose your own audio and video files, right in the browser.
- Instrument tuning reference: standard and alternate tunings for 20+ instruments with note, octave, and Hz, plus a piano you can drone any note from.
- Support & docs: every Tempo Kit feature, keyboard shortcut, and troubleshooting answer.