Getting Started on tuneUPGRADE
Here's how to get up and running in three simple steps.
by Tarun
Creator, tuneUPGRADE
Upgrade your practice time!
Congratulations on taking your first step towards making the most of your music practice time! In this post, we'll walk through how to get up and running in tuneUPGRADE with 3 simple steps:
Tell us what you're working on
Set up a practice routine
Practice!
(Psst..if you prefer to see a video, there's an introduction to tuneUPGRADE here, but this tutorial will show you more of a step-by-step setup to get started).
First Step: Tell us what you're working on
The first step is to set up some tunes and exercises in the Tunes area. The Tunes area is broken into three ways to categorize what you're working on, which lets you stay organized.
Learning - This is where you'll enter tunes you want to learn or are currently working on.
Repertoire - When you master a tune, you can promote it to your repertoire. Keeping your repertoire organized separately will let you keep a narrow list of things you're learning, but remember to come back and refresh yourself on tunes you've learned in the past.
Exercises - Exercises let you track warm ups or exercises that target certain skills, such as scales, dexterity exercises, ear training, and more.
Eventually, you can further categorize using tags, and even dynamically generate routines for yourself based on tags and more - but we're getting ahead of ourselves!
To get started, simply just enter a few tunes to learn and a few exercises. No need to fill out all the fields - only a title is required (but you can use the other fields to really help you out too!).
Second Step: Set up a Practice Routine
The second step is to set up a practice routine. Navigate to the Routines area and create yourself a routine. You can add tunes from your learning area, repertoire, or exercises, and even add in breaks. Open Practice time lets you add time to a routine without specifying a tune or exercise - so you can be as flexible as you'd like. To start, don't worry too much about the more advanced features like Smart Tunes - we'll go over those later.
Note that practice routines are optional. You can always practice a tunes in an ad-hoc fashion by visiting the tunes list and clicking the play button to track your time for it (or track manually on the log tab!) but Routines can help you structure your practice and ensure you aren't over or under practicing something - especially if you're a busy person who only has limited time to practice each day!
Third Step: Practice, and focus!
Once you've gotten a routine set up, go ahead and practice it by hitting the green play button on the routine list, or clicking the green Start Practicing!
This will take you to the practice preview screen, which lays out the routine you're about to start. If you specified any Books that your tunes or exercises belong to, it'll even tell you what books you'll need to pull out ahead of time.
When you signed up for tuneUPGRADE, you set up a weekly goal of how much you want to practice. (which can be changed on the Dashboard at any time). Here's where we start tracking that time when practicing! There's no need to watch the timer though - once it hits 0, a chime will let you know it's time to move on. That's not all - the timer will start counting up if you do want to spend more time than you had originally allotted - and all of this extra time will be tracked for you.
There's always a metronome at your fingertips (and by the way, it'll remember the tempo you last set for each tune!).
I'll also call attention to the Practice Notes section. This is a great place to take notes on what went well, what went poorly, and to review this next time you practice a tune.
Once you click next, you'll be taken to the next tune if your routine, until your routine is complete. Feel free to jump around if you'd like - tuneUPGRADE will always remember the time spent towards any tune, and it'll count towards your progress.
Once you've finished, you'll get a summary of what you practiced, and how close you are to meeting your weekly goal. You can always check out where you stand by viewing the Dashboard.
That's it!
Congratulations! You've mastered the basics of tuneUPGRADE. There are plenty of advanced features we didn't cover in this brief tutorial, such as tagging, smart tunes, YouTube and Spotify connectivity, and more! Head back to the tuneUPGRADE Help Center to read about more advanced features, or dive right in!
