The Practice Modes

Mankunku splits practice into three scored modes — Side A, Side B, and Tricks — that solve different problems, plus a fourth surface where you apply what they teach you. Side A trains your ear; Side B drills a line into your fingers; Tricks drills the formulas that generate lines; Tune Practice puts all of it into a real song form. They share the scoring machinery and the progress tracking, but they ask very different things of you in the room.

Side A — Ear Training

The classical exercise: someone plays a phrase, you play it back. Side A is that, automated.

  • The app picks a phrase that fits today's key and your proficiency in today's scale.
  • It plays the phrase through your speakers (or headphones) over a metronome.
  • It listens through your microphone while you play it back — the mic is open before you start, so you come in when you're ready and only your playing is scored, not your reaction time.
  • It scores how close you got on pitch and rhythm, and either advances you or hands you one retry (a second miss moves on anyway).

Side A is breadth-first. You hear a different phrase each time. Some you'll nail; some will catch you off guard. The point isn't memorizing the licks — it's getting faster at hearing a melodic shape and converting it to a fingering. The catalog is large enough that licks rarely repeat in a single session.

Use Side A when you want to build the listen → play reflex, work on tuning, get used to a new scale, or warm up at the start of a practice session.

Side B — Lick Practice

The opposite exercise: you already know what you want to play; the app helps you own it in every key over a backing track.

  • You tag licks from your book (stolen from the community, or recorded/written yourself) as "practice" licks, and each tagged lick carries one or more progression tags — ii-V-I major, blues, and so on — that say which backing tracks it plays cleanly over.
  • Side B picks one of your tagged licks and drills it over a chord progression — bass, comping, drums. A lick starts in a single key and earns more keys over successive sessions until it reaches all 12, working outward from its entry key along the circle of fifths.
  • Each session, you play the lick once per currently-unlocked key. Pass a key cleanly (≥ 90%) and it counts toward advancement; a key below the 75% floor blocks any tempo increase or new-key unlock until you bring it back up. Clear the whole set well — session average ≥ 90%, the newest key consolidated over three passes, and no key under the floor — and the next session unlocks one more key.
  • Tempo adjusts once per lick, from your average across the keys you played that session: +2 BPM at ≥ 95%, +1 at ≥ 90%, easing down by 1 in the 75–89% band, and −3 below 75%. (Single-lick Deep Practice runs its own rule instead: it opens 2% below the lick's saved tempo, bumps by the Tempo Bump setting (1% by default) only once you clear every currently-unlocked key in a round, and saves none of it. Launched from the report's weak-key recommendation it runs the focus drill: that key alone, 10% under, on a staircase — up per clear, down three steps per sub-75% attempt — until it's back at the saved tempo, then the other keys one per clear, weakest first, tempo held.)
  • A lick moves on to the next tagged one once you've played all of its currently-unlocked keys this session — you build a lick toward its full 12-key range one key at a time across many sessions, not all at once. (The session's time budget bounds the whole session, not each lick.)
  • Daily Practice — the default session type — rotates across every progression you have tagged licks for, sized to your time budget: a daily warm-up that touches every line in your book. A Focused Session pins one progression instead.
  • A Practice button on any lick's detail page in your book launches Deep Practice on that single lick — a focused, continuous round through just that lick's currently-unlocked keys. No rest bars, no round card: a one-bar ii-V turnaround joins each cycle to the next, the rotation is re-sorted so your worst key comes up first, keys you clear at 95% drop out, and after the opening demo the app stops demonstrating the lick to you once you're holding 90% on the key at the top — and never on a refill cycle, the one that follows clearing the whole rotation. It opens 2% below the lick's saved tempo; clear the whole rotation and it bumps (1% by default), refills, and opens straight on your worst key. The ramp is session-local — Daily Practice still finds the lick at the tempo it was graded at. The report's Next card is the other way in: when it names a key that came in under 75%, its button launches the focus drill — that key alone, worked back up to the saved tempo, then the rest of the rotation rebuilt one key per clear, weakest first.

Focused drills launched from the Daily report are the exception: one opening demo, then no repeat demos or inter-cycle turnaround. Retries and tempo steps join at the same downbeat; explicit sheet preparation remains. scheduleNextPhrase passes the boundary audio time to the backing scheduler, which plays already-dispatched opening hits directly and leaves future hits on the transport. The first recording window opens after the new backing schedule is installed.

Side B is depth-first. It assumes the line is already in your ear and your job is to wire it to your fingers across the cycle of fifths. The progress tracking is per-lick, per-key — you can see exactly which keys still trip you up on a given line, and which are clean.

Use Side B when there's a specific line you want to internalize — a Bird quote, a turnaround, a ii-V-I lick from your transcription book, a phrase you stole from a record. Stagger Side B sessions across the week and you'll have the line in every key in a month or so.

Tricks — the devices behind the lines

The third scored mode, in the nav under Tricks. It drills a formula rather than a phrase: enclosures and triad pairs, the two devices that generate most of what a bebop player actually improvises.

  • Each device has a mastery ladder — for enclosures, eight rungs from a single chromatic approach to a double-chromatic wrap landing off the beat, run as three parallel ladders (one per chord type: major, minor, dominant); for triad pairs, eight families from diatonic neighbours through the altered colours to whole tone. A rung opens once you've cleared 3 attempts at ≥ 90% on its prerequisite.
  • A drill runs like Deep Practice: continuous cycles over a two-bar vamp (major, dominant, or minor, whichever the variant wants), starting on your written C at 60 BPM and earning keys and tempo as you clear them. Enclosures drill a five-bar figure — a pickup bar of approach notes, then four landings on four downbeats; triad pairs a one-bar cell.
  • It plays you an example whenever there's something new to hear — the first round, and any round whose style you haven't heard yet this session — but you are not being asked to play the example back. You're being asked to play the device. Score it and the app checks whether your notes belong to the formula, not whether they match the demo. Triad pairs go further: play the pair as the demo cell, as alternating triplets, or as four eighths per triad, and the app takes the best of the three readings.

Tricks is generative. Side B gives you one line you can play anywhere; a trick gives you a shape you can apply to a chord you've never seen before.

Use Tricks when your solos sound like a chain of quotes, or when you can hear the device on a record and can't produce it on demand. Full detail in Practicing Tricks.

Tune Practice — applying it

The fourth surface, reached from Practice licks on any tune in your book. It isn't another kind of drill; it's the place the other three pay off.

  • The app reads a tune's changes and detects the progressions it knows inside them — short and long ii-V-Is, turnarounds, iii-VI-ii-V-I, vamps, blues. Each match becomes an insertion point: a window in the form, in a specific local key.
  • The rhythm section plays the form. The head plays once (jazz form rule), then the staff clears and the chorus is yours.
  • At each insertion point the app suggests licks that fit that progression in that key — ranked by what you've actually unlocked and drilled; in Suggest mode it only names licks you already have in that key, so it never asks for a key you haven't earned. Trick variants you've starred join the same list over vamps and ii-V-Is, ranked behind the licks tagged for the spot.
  • Three modes: Suggest (the lick is named for you), Points (you pick, and consecutive clean insertions score double), and Freestyle (no windows — just solo, and the app applauds the licks it recognises).

Tune Practice is context-first. It answers the question none of the drilling modes can: can you find this line when a real form goes by at tempo?

Use Tune Practice when you've got vocabulary banked and want to test whether it's actually available — or when learning a new standard and you want to know which of your lines fit where.

Its takes are deliberately not written into progress: no streak, no adaptive-level movement, no per-key lick scores. Scoring it would turn the applying-it room into another drilling room. See Playing Over Tunes.

What they share

  • The licks are shared. Side A queries the catalog for variety; Side B picks the specific licks you've tagged in your book.
  • The daily key rotates — every two or three days at first, daily once you've unlocked seven or more tonalities (more on this in The Daily Key). Side A defaults to today's key but lets you override; Side B and Tricks ignore the daily pick and run their own per-item key ladders, earning more keys toward the full 12 across successive sessions.
  • Difficulty climbs from your performance on Side A. Per-scale and per-key proficiency rise (or fall) with your accuracy, gating which licks surface and which keys and scales unlock — see Levels & Difficulty.
  • Scoring shares the machinery: the same forgiving alignment, the same latency correction, the same grade boundaries. Only the weighting differs — a lick is pitch at 60% and rhythm at 40%; a trick is formula-conformance at 70% and rhythm at 30%. The full breakdown is in How Scoring Works.
  • Progress and history roll up across all three drilling modes — your streak counts a Side B or Tricks session the same as a Side A session.
  • The band is shared too: Side B, Tricks, and Tune Practice all use the same generated rhythm section, in whichever of the four styles you pick.

How a phrase travels through the app

Whichever mode you're in, a single attempt follows the same path under the hood. You don't need to think about any of this while you play — but it helps to know what the app is doing on your behalf:

  1. The app picks (or generates) a phrase. On Side A, it's drawn from the catalog, your own licks included, and transposed into today's key. On Side B, it's the current tagged lick transposed into the current key. On Tricks, it's a fresh realization of the device's formula.
  2. The phrase plays through speakers or headphones — over the click alone on Side A, over a count-in and the rhythm section everywhere else.
  3. After the phrase ends, the beat keeps going and the app is listening through your microphone. On Side A the mic opens before you play, so your first note's attack is always caught and the lead-in before it is discarded; in the continuous modes your window opens on a bar line.
  4. As you play, a real-time pitch detector picks up each note. On Side A the recording closes after about two seconds of silence; in the continuous modes it closes on the bar where your window ends.
  5. The detected notes get matched against the expected ones. The match isn't note-for-note: a flexible alignment lets you be a little late or a little early, lets you drop a note, lets you add an extra one. Each note gets a pitch (or conformance) score and a rhythm score; the two are combined into an overall percentage and a grade.
  6. The result lands in your progress: today's date gets logged, the streak ticks (or holds), and the relevant per-key and per-category averages update. (Tune practice is the exception — it scores you but writes nothing.)

The deeper details — why the alignment is forgiving, what the grades mean, why pitch counts more than rhythm — are in How Scoring Works.

A note on the design choice

The modes exist because four very different kinds of practice all happen on a horn:

  • Hearing a melody you've never heard before and reproducing it. Sight-singing for instrumentalists. This is Side A's job.
  • Internalizing a memorized line so it's available in any key under any tempo. The "vocabulary" half of jazz practice. This is Side B's job.
  • Owning a device — a shape you can apply to a chord you've never played over, without recalling a specific line. This is Tricks' job.
  • Retrieving the right thing at the right moment while a form goes by. The part that only ever happened on a bandstand. This is Tune Practice's job.

Trying to do them in one mode means picking which one to half-do. Splitting them lets the app commit fully to each — the listen-and-play loop on Side A doesn't need a backing track or a key cycle; the 12-key drill on Side B doesn't need to surprise you with new content; Tricks can score you for not copying the demo, which would be a bug anywhere else; and the tune session doesn't need a grade book, because the drilling modes already have one.