Reed — Saxophone Coach

Reed listens to you play, measures what actually happened, and tells you what to change.

Nothing about your playing is self-reported. There is no "mark this as done" button on a drill, no practice streak you keep by tapping. Every score comes from a recorded attempt: it hears the note, tracks the pitch frame by frame, and grades what it measured.


WHAT IT MEASURES

Four scores, every attempt, each one traceable to something real:

• Pitch — how far off, in cents, and whether the note drifted while you held it.
• Tone steadiness — how much the sound wobbled, and whether it faded across the hold.
• Timing — where each attack landed against the click, or whether a long tone lasted its written length.
• Attack — how long each note took to reach full volume, and how many swelled in late instead of speaking cleanly.

Underneath: YIN pitch detection on the device, note segmentation that tells a slur from a re-articulation, and a grader that states every penalty in multiples of the tolerance window.


PICK YOUR HORN

Soprano, alto or tenor. Everything re-tunes: target frequencies, the concert-pitch readout, the tuner. Written pitch never changes — only what a written note sounds like does. Scores are kept per horn, so an alto history is never averaged into a tenor one.


EXERCISES THAT OPEN WHEN YOU EARN THEM

Breath and tone, rhythm and fingers, riffs and phrasing, sight-reading, altissimo. Advanced material unlocks on a measured score rather than a level number: altissimo at tone steadiness 80, sixteenth-note riffs at timing 70. You cannot grind past it, and you never wait once you can play it.


REAL MUSIC, NOT JUST DRILLS

Import a song from a recording or from a sheet — a PDF, a photo, a scan. It is stored in concert pitch, transposed to your horn as you read it and folded into your playable range. (Import uses Google's Gemini and needs your own API key.)

The follow-along player wraps the line onto two-bar systems, highlights the note under the playhead and scrolls itself, in three modes. Listen sounds the line. Practice judges each note as the playhead passes and keeps your best accuracy. Note by note cues one note and then waits — the clock is you, not a tempo — so a line you cannot yet play at speed is still one you can learn.


A TUNER THAT KNOWS WHAT YOU READ

Written pitch large, concert pitch underneath, because confusing the two is the mistake a tuner should not encourage. A metronome, and a drone on any of six centres. All of it follows the horn you picked, and none of it is graded.


THE HORN'S SIDE OF IT

A saxophone that has stopped sealing looks exactly like a player who has stopped improving. Care is four routines on their own clocks — the pack-down after every session, a weekly clean, a monthly once-over, the service with a tech — each a checklist whose ticks expire when the round does, each step carrying the reason as well as the method.


BUILT FOR A MUSIC STAND

The primary surface is an iPad in landscape, a metre away, read with a saxophone in your hands. Reading distance is a setting, not an accessibility afterthought: text size goes from Standard up to Music stand, and the whole app — staff included — grows with it. On iPhone it is five tabs and one drill at a time.


AN INSTRUMENT CHECK, NOT A FUDGE

Four short takes with your horn measure the noise floor of your room and microphone. That is the only thing it moves — tolerances and thresholds are identical everywhere, because the moment calibration touches those, two attempts in different rooms stop being comparable.


PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION

No account, no sign-in, no server. Practice audio is analysed in memory and dropped — never written to disk, never uploaded. The optional AI coach explains your numbers and never scores you: if it disagreed with the grader, the grader wins. Without a key the app never touches the network at all. Everything is erasable and exportable as CSV.


Requires the microphone. Bring a saxophone.