Practice Lab

Guitar · bass · ukulele · piano

Know what to practise, every time you pick up your instrument

Practice Lab builds your plan, writes the exercises in every key and position with real fingering, and adapts each session to how the last one went. Free, in your browser, no account.

Start practisingSee how a session works ↓
A plan session: a warm-up block of E-flat minor pentatonic triads on the fretboard, the block timer, and the question How did that feel? with Too easy, About right and Too hard.
A session block. Practice Lab picked the goal, the key and the exercise; you play, then say how it felt.
178scales, chords, arpeggios and voicings
12drop-2 shapes of one seventh chord, all found
5–60minute sessions, planned block by block
4instruments under one plan
11languages

The plan

A coach that remembers what you know

A short setup asks what you play and what you already know, on paper and under your fingers, for each instrument. Practice Lab turns that into goals, and every session into blocks: a warm-up, goals interleaved, a review, a stretch near the end.

After each block you answer Too easy About right Too hard, and the next block moves its level and tempo to keep you between bored and lost.

The You page: a plan of guitar goals (Dorian, Mixolydian) and any-instrument goals (reading the staff, ear training), next to progress: 2 hr 33 min this week, a 16-day streak, a four-week chart of minutes played, tempo per goal and how each block felt.
Your plan and how it is going. Practice time, streak, tempo per goal, and how each block felt.
Setup, step 2 of 4: What do you already know? Theory picks such as Dorian and Mixolydian, and what you can play on guitar and on piano.
The setup. Theory and playing are kept apart: fluent on guitar, new on piano is a normal profile.

Practice is chosen for you, so the time goes into playing.

The exercises

Written for you, in every position, with fingering you can play

Pick any structure in any key and Practice Lab writes the run across the whole neck, up to three notes per string, position by position. The tab follows how a teacher fingers it: one finger per fret, stay in position, shift at a rest.

A C major scale run shown as tab across six strings, with the play, loop, tempo and metronome controls above it.
Tab with hand positions. A C major run sweeping every position, at your tempo, on a metronome.
A drop-2 major seventh arpeggio paused mid-run: an arrow on the fretboard points to the next note, and a row of shape diagrams marks the current one as NOW.
Shape by shape. Drop-2 arpeggios move through every inversion, with an arrow to the next note.
A C Dorian 2 up 1 down run written as notation, with the current note coloured.
Read it as notation. Every run also shows as a piano roll or on the staff.

Voicings and structures

Every shape of a chord, not just the one you know

Drop 2 has twelve shapes: four inversions on three string sets. Practice Lab finds all of them, and drop 3, shells, rootless and quartal voicings, then stacks them as coloured layers over the scales they come from, labelled 1 3 5 7 by degree.

The Structures page: C major pentatonic, C major and A minor triads and a C drop-2 major seventh voicing as four coloured layers on one fretboard, with the layer list and the Practise this card.
Four layers on one neck. A scale, two triads and a voicing, each one click away from practice.
6-string fretboard, 15 fretsdrop2: G2 (5) — string 6, fret 3 · 3rd inversion5drop2: C3 (1) — string 5, fret 3 · 3rd inversion1drop2: E3 (3) — string 4, fret 2 · 3rd inversion3drop2: B3 (7) — string 3, fret 4 · 3rd inversion76E25A24D33G32B31E4123456789
  • Cmaj7, drop 2: one voicing, the others in the window faint
Voicing mode: one playable shape at a time, stepped through a fret window.
Piano voicings of C major seventh with right-hand fingering numbers on the keys and six inversion diagrams, the first inversion marked NOW.
And on the piano. Voicings with right-hand fingering, inversion by inversion.

Progressions

A voice-leading lab for the changes

Comp through a progression with voicings chosen to move smoothly, see which voice moves where, and swap in substitutions such as the tritone sub to hear what they change.

The voice-leading lab: a ii–V–I in C with D-flat 7, the tritone substitute, on the board, C major seventh faded next with arrows for the moving voices, six semitones of total movement, and the variants for each chord.
ii–V–I with a tritone sub. This chord solid, the next faded, arrows for the voices that move.

Quizzes

Name it, find it, hear it

Notes, intervals, chords and scales on the board, on the staff and by ear, and every place a note lives on the neck, against the clock.

Read the staff, chords: 3 of 3 right with a streak of 3, a chord on the staff and five answers to choose from.
Read the staff. Correct spelling, close answers, a running score.
Find every F in frets 0 to 4: two found notes in green, one found, none missed, 0.3 seconds on average.
Find the notes. Every F in frets 0–4, before the time runs out.

Transcribe

Learn a recording, section by section

Mark the sections, loop the one you are learning, and slow it to 10 % without changing the pitch. Mark sections can't yet learning confident and watch the song fill in.

Transcribe: a recording’s waveform split into sections by numbered markers, each marked green, orange or red for how well it is played, with one section looped.
A riff in seven sections. The audio stays on your device; nothing is uploaded.

On your phone

The practice room, on the music stand

The same app on a phone: one section at a time, the transport at your thumb, nothing to install.

Phone: a C Dorian 2 up 1 down run on the fretboard with an arrow to the next note and the transport at the bottom.
Practice
Phone: a waveform with the sections Riff and Riff again, status dots and a looped segment.
Transcribe
Phone: progress tiles, 2 hr 33 min this week and a 16-day streak, a four-week chart and a table of goals.
Progress

Why it is built this way

Practice that follows how skills stick

  1. Recall, not re-reading

    Labels fade from C to 1 to nothing, so you produce the notes instead of watching them.

  2. Small chunks

    Overlapping groups of a few notes, and eight-bar runs with a clear start and end.

  3. Mixed, not blocked

    Sessions interleave goals and pattern families instead of drilling one thing for twenty minutes.

  4. Hard enough

    Your answers keep each block just past comfortable, at a tempo you can play cleanly.

Free, with an optional Plus

Everything on this page is free, for good

Free

The plan, sessions, every exercise, voicings, progressions, quizzes and Transcribe. No account, no ads.

$0

Plus

Sync between your devices and an account backup, with progress over months, a tempo trainer and printable practice sheets on the way. Starts with 14 days free.

$50 a year · $15 a quarter · $129 once plus VAT where it applies

Compare free and Plus →

Yours, on your device

Your plan, progress and recordings stay in this browser. Export backup saves your plan and progress to a file whenever you like. Signing in for Plus syncs your practice data; recordings never leave your device.

In eleven languages

English · Čeština · Deutsch · Français · Español · Italiano · Português · Polski · 日本語 · 中文 · 한국어

Practice Lab is made by Graph Software s.r.o., which is also building Graph, a music library for collectors.