#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 — a page with one card per device. (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 five things:

Approaches from above are scale neighbours; approaches from below are chromatic — and both are drawn from the chord type's own scale and tones, so enclosing the 3rd of a minor chord is a genuinely different set of notes than enclosing the 3rd of a dominant. The drill figure normally starts with a real pickup: the approach notes sit in a partial bar before the first full bar, resolve onto its downbeat, and then the figure does the same thing three more times — four landings on four consecutive downbeats, the last one held. "Off the beat" shifts the whole thing an eighth later, which is where it actually lives in most bebop lines. (One exception: a single approach note landing off the beat has no pickup bar — the figure starts on the downbeat and runs four bars.) (Inside tune practice the app uses a compact two-bar version of the same figure, sized to fit an insertion window.)

#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 every variant 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. Enclosures give you three parallel ladders — one per chord type (major, minor, dominant), each with the same eight rungs, and all three start open at the bottom: progress on the major chain earns you nothing on the minor one, because the notes really are different. Within a chain the 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 Enclosures from the Tricks page and the Mastery path connects its variants in one graph. Choose Major, Minor, or Dominant to see that family's path. Every node shows its contour, status, and pass count; selecting even a locked node previews the shape above. The final step needs three passes on both connected prerequisites. Triad pairs retain their linear ladder and next up indicator.

#The trick page

The enclosure page uses the same Phrase canvas as Lick Practice. The larger circle is the target note, with its chord role underneath — including ♭3, ♭5, and ♭7 where appropriate. Smaller circles show the approaches on a faint musical staff. Tap the target to choose its chord tone, an approach to choose the complete pattern, or 1 / 2 / 3 to change the number of approaches. Tap 1 or & on the beat ruler to move the arrival; the gold line stays centered on beat 1. Hear auditions the selected shape with a pulse.

The canvas and the connected mastery graph share one selection. Locked steps and other combinations are available to explore, but a single-chord drill starts only from an unlocked mastery variant. Practice this enclosure carries the selected family and shape into Lick Practice setup; ☆ Suggest in tunes keeps its existing opt-in behavior. Your progress shows the selected family's variant history once it has any.

Triad pairs retain their variant pills, notated formula, preview-key controls, and linear mastery path. Their preview key changes only the example. Enclosures preview in your written C; both devices start new drills in your written C, whatever instrument you play, and unlock more keys from there.

Neither practice button starts recording immediately. On the setup page, press Start Trick Drill when ready. You can also enter there directly by choosing Tricks as the Session Type and then Enclosures or Triad Pairs.

#Enclosures across a progression

The Practice over picker offers the three single-chord vamps and long ii–V–I in major and minor. In written C, the long forms are Dm7 → G7 → Cmaj7 and Dm7♭5 → G7♭9 → Cm7, with one bar, one bar, and two bars respectively. The tonic's wider cell shows its duration. Select a chord cell to inspect that arrival; the same count, shape, target degree, and beat placement follow every chord change. The target pitch and scale approaches adapt to each chord, including the diminished fifth on the minor ii chord.

Each long progression has its own saved passes, tempo, and key unlocks for each enclosure shape. Practicing it does not unlock a rung in the single-chord mastery paths. Long progressions allow all valid enclosure combinations, including shapes that are outside those paths.

#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. Enclosures use the selected single chord or long major/minor ii–V–I. A long progression encloses each new chord once and keeps the tonic harmony for its two bars; pickup approaches sound over the preceding chord. Triad pairs use their family's vamp: major for the three diatonic pairs, dominant for the altered and whole-tone ones, minor for the melodic-minor pair. The session header names the bed.
• The key. A new variant starts with one key — your written C, the one you read as 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 by whatever the Tempo Bump knob is set to — 1% by default — rounded up to a whole BPM, so at least 1 BPM and more as you get faster. In a Trick Drill the tempo only ever goes up — a bad round costs you the round, not the tempo — and unlike Deep Practice it is saved, because clearing the rotation is the only way a variant advances at all.
• The demo plays when there's something new to hear. The first round opens with the app playing an example in the current key, then you answer. After that a round only opens with a demo if its example style is one you haven't heard this session — enclosures have one style, so you hear the demo once, at the very beginning, and then the rounds run straight into each other; triad pairs rotate three styles, so you hear each of those once. A freshly regenerated figure in a style you've already heard is not a new thing to listen to, so it doesn't earn another Listen. (That's Continuous mode; in Call & Response the app plays its half in every key anyway.)
• One window per key, back to back, sized to the figure — two bars for a triad-pair cell, longer for the full enclosure figure with its pickup — 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 progression chip, the key you're in, the stack of chord rows — one per key, stepping up as you go, with the Listen and Play tabs in red and brass — and the key ring with your current BPM. You do not get notation of the figure while you're playing — that's deliberate. You explored it on the canvas or 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 introduces them one round each — cell, then triplets, then four eighths — which is the only place the app shows you they exist; once all three have played, the rounds open without a demo.

#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 tagged for that progression at the same level of mastery, so a ii-V-I lick you know in that key is named ahead of a trick you know there.
• A device needs a chord to sit on. The app looks for a full bar of a chord whose quality suits the variant — the triad-pair family, or the enclosure's chord type — and re-roots the figure on that chord: an altered pair lands on the V of a long ii-V-I rather than on the tonic, and a dominant-type enclosure finds the dominant bar. If no bar in the progression matches, the variant is quietly skipped.
• In Suggest mode two extra filters apply: a variant you don't yet have in that key — never drilled there, and not reached on its key ladder — is dropped, and so is anything whose practiced tempo is below the tune's tempo. Points mode doesn't filter — the pick card shows the five best-ranked candidates, tricks included.
• Enclosures play a compact two-bar version of their figure here, sized to fit the window, rather than the five-bar drill figure.

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 total and connection 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 sets that percentage (0.5–5%, 1% by default) only appears on the Deep Practice setup, but its value governs trick drills too. Unlike Deep Practice, a trick drill does save its bumped tempo — clearing the rotation is the only way a trick advances at all.
• 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.