Instrumentive practice reminders

Instrumentive offers reminders to help you build a practice routine and make time to review your progress. Practice reminders can be scheduled for specific days of the week. Tap a reminder notification to open the app and log your practice.

Setting up practice reminders

  1. Open the Home tab and tap times per week to open your weekly target and reminder settings.
  2. Choose your weekly practice target: how many times you want to practice, or how many hours you want to spend practicing each week.
  3. Select the days of the week on which you want a practice reminder.
  4. Choose the time you want to receive the reminder.

For example, you could aim to practice three times a week and set reminders for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6 pm. To change your target or reminder schedule later, return to these settings from the Home tab.

Why should I set daily practice reminders?

There are several different schools of thought on the best practice methods to learn a new skill (deliberate, purposeful, distributed, to name a few). However, all of these agree that to learn a new skill you need to put in the hours.

The easiest way to do this is to turn your music practice into a habit that you do regularly. So how do you build up these habits? Most importantly you need to make practice easy and obvious by scheduling a regular time to do it. This makes it less likely that you will make up excuses or simply forget. In Instrumentive we help you with this by providing a way to set practice reminders. Have a think about when the best time for you to practice will be and then set the app to remind you at this time. The reminder notification will also let you know your progress against your weekly targets for motivation. Tapping on the notification will open the app making it easy to record any practice that you are doing.

Why do I need to schedule a weekly review?

The downside of creating habits is that as habits become automatic, you can fall into mindless repetition. For example, simply playing the same piece over and over will eventually stop being beneficial. Instead you need to look carefully at your strengths and weaknesses when playing the piece and identify areas for improvement.

One way to combat this is to establish a feedback process that lets you review what you have been doing and identify specific areas to work on. This could be done through a teacher or mentor, or if you are practicing on your own simply putting aside time to review what you have been doing, and listening to recordings of your playing can help a lot. Instrumentive provides an option to set a reminder for a weekly review session. This is a time to review existing goals and set new ones, as well as ask yourself general questions on progress that week: