Riffshed: Practice Journal

A practice journal for jazz musicians who want to see whether they're actually getting better — not just doing it more.

Reps over minutes, a focus-block timer, a built-in metronome, sheet music inside the card, and one-tap links to iReal Pro, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud. Ships with curated starter libraries to start from on day one. Free, no signup, no ads, ever.

Riffshed is built around how serious musicians practise: small, well-defined units of work, executed with attention and counted honestly.

THREE PHASES, ONE CARD

Every card moves through three phases — Explore (decode the material), Integrate (clean it at slow tempo), Master (let it play itself). Each phase has its own rep counter, so the number on screen actually means something. Promotion is always your call.

THE 20/5 RHYTHM

Twenty minutes of focused work on one card, then a mandatory five-minute break. Borrowed from the Pomodoro Technique and tuned for instrumental practice. Both intervals are configurable. The open-ended ∞ mode drops the timer for jam sessions and lessons.

A METRONOME YOU'LL ACTUALLY WANT TO USE

Full-screen pendulum, BPM, meter, swing and accent/click on any subdivision. Available from any card.

EVERYTHING THE CARD NEEDS

Each card carries title, notes, target tempo, separate rep counters per phase, an optional PDF score that opens full-screen inside Riffshed, and a link out to where the material lives — iReal Pro, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, or any URL. Riffshed recognises the destination and shows the right icon.

When you tap and jump out to iReal Pro for chord changes or YouTube for a lesson, the focus timer keeps running. When your 20 minutes are up, a quiet push calls you back for the break. You stay in the practice; Riffshed minds the clock.

LIBRARIES AND YOUR DATA

Ships with curated starter libraries, including one for iReal Pro users with deep links to chord charts of jazz standards. Build your own libraries from scratch, import a curriculum your teacher built for you in one tap, export your session log. Everything stays on your device. No account, no cloud you don't control.

NOT JUST FOR JAZZ

The methodology — phases, reps, focus blocks — works for any deliberate instrumental practice. Classical, rock, folk, world music, anything. Riffshed is jazz-first because that's the community it came from.

BUILT ON RESEARCH

The phase model comes from Fitts & Posner's three-stage motor learning model (1967). The reps-over-minutes idea draws on Anders Ericsson's deliberate practice research and Roger Chaffin's empirical work on how concert musicians actually practise. The third phase, Master, takes its feel from Kenny Werner's Effortless Mastery.

FROM ME

I built Riffshed for my own jazz practice, kept using it, figured other musicians might want it too. The app will always be free. Feedback genuinely welcome — write through the support page.