#Practicing Tricks

Side A trains your ear. Side B drills a line into your fingers. Tricks drill a device — a small melodic formula you can apply to any chord, in any key, forever.

The difference matters. A lick is one answer someone already wrote down. An enclosure is the machine that writes a thousand of them. Nobody in the tradition learned to enclose a chord tone by memorising twelve enclosures; they learned the shape and then made it up on the spot. So Tricks scores you on fluency, not reproduction: the app plays you an example, but it is not asking you to play that example back. It's asking you to play the device, however you choose to lay it out. Get the formula right and you score, even if your notes don't match the demo.

Find it under Tricks in the top nav. (It isn't in the small link row on the home page — the nav is the way in.)

#The two devices

There are exactly two, and they're the two that pay the most rent in a bebop vocabulary.

#Enclosures

Surround a chord tone with scale and chromatic neighbours before landing on it — the bebop way to make targets feel inevitable.

You choose four things:

Approaches from above are scale neighbours; approaches from below are chromatic. The figure runs two bars: state the chord tone, wrap it and land on it in the middle of the phrase, then wrap it and land on it again at the top of bar two. "Off the beat" shifts the whole thing an eighth later, which is where it actually lives in most bebop lines.

#Triad Pairs

Alternate the two triads of a pair — from diatonic neighbours to altered and whole-tone colours — to build angular, modern-sounding lines from just six notes.

One control, labelled Pair, with eight families. Both triads are anchored to the chord root and share no notes, so a pair gives you a six-note palette that sits deliberately askew of the scale:

The default shape is eight eighth notes in a bar: triad A up, triad B up, then the first two notes of A again. A is always the lower-rooted triad.

#The mastery ladder

You don't get all eight variants on day one. Each device is a ladder, and you start on the bottom rung: Single chromatic approach for enclosures, Major pair a whole step apart for triad pairs.

A rung unlocks when you've cleared 3 passes of its prerequisite. A "pass" is one recorded key attempt scoring 90% or better in a Trick Drill. Passes are counted across every key, so three good takes in C will do it — they don't have to be in three different keys. Only Trick Drill counts; a trick you play inside tune practice earns nothing toward the ladder.

The triad-pair ladder is a straight line: clear each family and the next one opens, walking you from diatonic pairs through the altered colours to whole tone. The enclosure ladder branches — clearing Enclose the 3rd, above then below opens four rungs at once (the 5th, the three-note version, the double chromatic, and the off-beat version), and the last rung wants three passes each of two different prerequisites.

Open a trick from the Tricks page and the Mastery path at the bottom lays the whole ladder out: a tick and a pass count on what you've unlocked, a lock and the prerequisite spelled out on what you haven't, and a next up chip on whatever is one step away.

#The trick page

Tapping a trick card opens its page. Top to bottom:

• Variant pills — one per rung, in ladder order. Locked ones show a padlock.
• Practice this variant and a ☆ Suggest in tunes star (more on the star below).
• A Preview key row, and underneath it The formula — one plain sentence describing the variant ("Approach the 3rd from above (scale) then below (chromatic), landing on the downbeat") and a notated example.
• The Mastery path.
• Your progress — a tempo-over-time chart, once you have any.

One thing to know about that page: the Preview key pills only re-notate the example so you can read it in your own key. They don't set the drill key — a drill always starts in concert C and grows outward along the circle of fifths. The example itself is drawn over the same harmony the drill uses, so an altered or whole-tone triad pair is notated over a dominant chord, not a major one.

Practice this variant doesn't start a session. It carries your choice over to the Lick Practice page and leaves you at the setup screen, where you still have to press Start Trick Drill. (You can also get there directly: pick Tricks as the Session Type on the Lick Practice page and choose the device and its parameters there. Values you haven't earned are disabled with "Locked — earn it on the mastery ladder", and a Next unlock line tells you what's next.)

#What a drill is like

It runs on the same engine as single-lick Deep Practice, so it's continuous — no rest bars, no round-complete card, nothing to dismiss. It goes until you press End Session.

• The bed. Two bars of one chord, vamping. Enclosures always drill over a major vamp. Triad pairs use whatever their family wants: major for the three diatonic pairs, dominant for the altered and whole-tone ones, minor for the melodic-minor pair. The chip in the session header names it.
• The key. A new variant starts with one key — concert C — and earns more the way licks do, spreading outward around the circle. Keys are displayed in your written pitch.
• The tempo. 60 BPM to start. Clear every key in the rotation and it goes up 5 BPM. In a Trick Drill the tempo only ever goes up — a bad round costs you the round, not the tempo.
• Every round opens with the demo. Two bars of the app playing an example in the current key, then you answer. Unlike Deep Practice, the demo never gets dropped, because the figure is regenerated fresh every round — there's always something new to hear.
• Two bars per key, back to back, with your percentage flashing on the chart row as each window closes. Keys you score 95% or better on drop out of the rotation for the rest of the session, so the cycle keeps getting shorter and lands on what's still shaky.
• One bar of turnaround joins the rounds, and then it starts again.

On screen you get the trick and variant name, the vamp chip, the key you're in, a scrolling chord chart, and the key ring with your current BPM. You do not get notation of the figure while you're playing — that's deliberate. You looked at it on the trick page; now play it.

The report at the end shows rounds completed, your final tempo and how far it moved, and which keys you cleared in which round.

#How a trick is scored

Same 0–100 scale and the same grade boundaries as everything else in the app, but built from different parts:

overall = 70% conformance + 30% rhythm (a lick is 60/40 pitch/rhythm).

Conformance asks, note by note: does this belong to the formula? Every note is judged by pitch class alone — octave never matters in trick scoring, so play the shape wherever it sits best on your horn.

The two devices lean in opposite directions, which matches how they're actually played. Triad pairs are lenient on the note and strict on the triad: any member of the correct triad at that moment is full marks; a member of the other triad in the pair still gets 0.7. Enclosures are strict on the note and lenient on the neighbourhood: the specific approach note is full marks, and a different plausible neighbour on the same side gets 0.7.

Extra notes you add don't subtract from the conformance score directly — they just make the alignment harder. Missed notes do count as zeros. And your constant reaction delay is subtracted before any timing is judged, exactly as in the rest of the app.

#The three ways to play a triad pair

A triad pair isn't one lick, so the app accepts three readings of it and scores whichever fits you best:

• The cell — eight eighths: A up, B up, back to the first two of A. What the demo plays first.
• Alternating triplets — twelve notes, one triplet group per beat, A-B-A-B.
• Four eighths each — four notes of A, four of B, with a root-3rd-5th-3rd contour.

You don't pick one. Play the pair however you like and the app takes the best of the three. The demo rotates through them round by round — cell, triplets, four eighths — which is the only place the app shows you they exist.

#What you actually see

One percentage per key, coloured by how well you did, and the same colour on the key ring. That's it. The app knows exactly which slot you missed and by how much, and it doesn't tell you — there's no per-note table for tricks, no grade word, no "you were on the right pair but the wrong triad", and it won't tell you which of the three triad-pair readings it credited you with. Take the number as a signal and use your own ears for the diagnosis.

#Tricks in tune practice

A trick can turn up as a suggestion inside a tune-practice session, but only if you star it first — the ☆ Suggest in tunes toggle on the trick page. No stars, no trick suggestions.

Where they show up:

• Only over vamps and ii-V-Is (major and minor, short and long). Never over a turnaround, a iii-VI-ii-V-I, or blues.
• They're ranked below licks written for that progression, so a real ii-V-I lick always gets named first.
• Triad pairs need a chord to sit on. The app looks for a full bar of a chord whose quality suits the family, and re-roots the pair on that chord — so an altered pair lands on the V of a long ii-V-I rather than on the tonic. If no bar in the progression matches, that pair is quietly skipped.
• In Suggest mode two extra filters apply: variants you've never passed in that key are dropped, and so is anything whose practiced tempo is below the tune's tempo. Points mode doesn't filter — everything eligible appears in the pick card.

On the chart it reads as a band labelled with the device and the variant. It's scored on fluency, the same as a drill, and it counts toward your points and your streak — but it writes nothing back to the trick: no passes, no key unlocks, no tempo. Tune practice is where you find out whether the device is available to you; the drill is where you earn it.

#How to actually use this

• Pick one rung and stay on it for a week. Three passes is not a lot; the point is not to sprint up the ladder but to get one shape so automatic you stop thinking about it.
• Play it your way, not the demo's way. Especially on triad pairs. The scoring is built to reward you for finding your own ordering — if you're copying the demo note for note you're doing the Side B exercise, not this one.
• Get it out of C. A device you can only apply in C isn't a device, it's a fingering — and the only way the rotation grows is by clearing every key you already have at 95%. That's the mechanism; lean into it.
• Then go and use it. Star the variant, open a standard you know, and run tune practice. The gap between clearing a rung in the drill and actually finding the device in bar 13 of All the Things You Are is the gap this app exists to close.

#Where this is still thin

Honest notes, so you don't waste time looking for things that aren't there:

• There is no guided tour for Tricks and no help link on the pages.
• The Progress page has no trick content. Trick drills count toward your streak and your practice calendar, but the per-variant history only lives on the trick's own page — and that chart only gains a point when you clear a whole rotation, so it can stay empty for a long time.
• Two different thresholds are at work and neither is labelled: 90% is a pass (it feeds the ladder), 95% clears a key (it feeds tempo and key unlocks).
• The Tempo Bump knob that controls the +5 BPM only appears on the Deep Practice setup, but its value governs trick drills too.
• Your drill tempo is the lowest tempo stored across the variant's keys, so one key left sitting at a slow BPM pins the whole variant there.