UpstrokeA practice journal for a repertoire you mean to keep.
iPhone · free · no account
The premise
Practice apps count minutes.
A journal remembers what happened inside them — the tune you left sitting at 96, the note about the B part, the take you meant to listen back to. Upstroke keeps that record across three or four instruments at once, and asks nothing of you between sessions.
Plan
Decide the session before you pick the thing up.
An instrument, a length, and sections in the order you actually work: warmup, old tunes, the new one. Items come from your own repertoire, each carrying the tempo you last played it at.
- Start from a saved plan, last week's session, or an empty forty-five minutes.
- Section minutes that add up in front of you, so you notice at 47 of 45.
- Suggestions pulled from what you already own, never from a catalogue.
Session
One thing on the screen at a time.
The running screen holds the current item, the note you left on it last time, and the clock for the section it belongs to. Everything else waits. A note, a photo or a recording is one tap from the item itself — not from a menu.
- Pause stops every clock, and says so rather than quietly keeping count.
- A section going well gets five more minutes; the rest of the plan absorbs it.
Tempo
Never a tempo without the one it moved from.
Tempo is the one number worth keeping, and it is worthless on its own. Every item stores a comfortable tempo; the metronome knows what it is currently clicking at; and when the two disagree the app shows you both and offers to move the record.
Listen
Hear what you actually played.
Record a take without leaving the item. Trim the false start off the front, write the note while it is still true, and keep it — or discard it and play the thing again. Takes belong to the tune, so a year of Blackberry Blossom sits in one place.
- Trim handles, a level adjustment, and nothing resembling a mixing desk.
- Storage is shown in megabytes, because it is your phone paying for it.
Charts
The handout, photographed and filed where the tune is.
A workshop chart, a whiteboard from Thursday’s lesson, chord shapes scrawled on a napkin. Photograph it during the session and it attaches to the item, not to a camera roll you will never search.
Quiet
It never grades you.
There are no badges, no scores, and no bar creeping toward a goal you set in a better mood. Miss a fortnight and nothing has accumulated against you — the journal simply picks up where you stopped, with the tempos and the notes exactly as you left them.
Privacy
Everything you record stays on the phone.
There is no account to make and no server to send your practice to. Your sessions, notes, tempos, photographs and recordings are written to your device and stay there. Back them up with your phone; delete the app and they go with it. The one thing that leaves is an anonymous crash report, and the policy names it. Read the privacy policy.
- Accounts
- None
- Sync
- None
- Analytics
- None
- Network use
- Crash reports only
Placeholder — pick one of the nine quotes in the app's practice-quotes.ts.
Upstroke is in TestFlight.
A build goes out every few weeks. Tell me what breaks and what you would throw away — the early testers have decided most of what is on this page.
iPhone 12 or later · iOS 17+