#How to Practice

Mankunku is a call-and-response app. The app plays you a phrase; you play it back; it scores your accuracy and either moves you on or hands you a retry. Around that loop are two main practice modes (Side A and Side B), a Tricks room for practicing melodic devices rather than fixed lines, a surface where you apply all of it over a real tune, your books of licks and tunes, and a progress dashboard.

This page walks through the practice flow as it actually feels in the room — what to listen for, what to do with your horn in your hands, what each setting changes.

#The dashboard

When you open the app signed in, you land on the home page. It's the front cover of the LP. (Signed out, the same URL shows a descriptive landing page about the app instead — sign in and the dashboard below takes its place.) From here you can:

• Jump straight into Side A (Ear Training) or Side B (Lick Practice).
• See your streak — consecutive days you've practiced. Skip a day and it resets to 1; the longest streak you've ever held is preserved separately.
• See today's key — the key + scale rotating today. You can override this on the Settings page.
• See your Tonal Mastery (0–100, with its band name from Beginner to Virtuoso) and the key and score of your last take on the Side A card; the Side B card counts the licks you've tagged ("3 licks ready") with your best tempo and when you last drilled, or tells you to go tag one.

If today is your first day, you won't have a streak or a mastery number yet. Hit Side A and start. Until you've taken it, a Take a quick tour? banner offers a one-minute walk round the app.

Under the two cards is a small link row — Licks, Tunes, Progress, Scales, Settings — and everything is in the top nav: Home, Ear Training, Lick Practice, Licks, Tricks, Tunes, Progress, Docs, Settings, with Sign In (or your account menu, with Sign Out) at the end. (Tricks and Docs are nav-only.)

#Side A — Ear Training

This is the call-and-response loop.

#The flow, beat by beat

1. Pick up your horn. The page is deliberately bare — today's key and scale, one big button, and a score. Nothing to configure at the last second.
2. Press the big button once. That starts a loop, not a single phrase. After a bar of click, the app plays a phrase through your speakers (or headphones) with the metronome ticking underneath, then hands the beat to you, then scores you, then goes straight into the next one. You press the button again (it turns red while the loop runs) when you want out.
3. Listen all the way through. Don't start playing along. The phrase usually sits inside one or two bars; let the whole thing land in your ear before you reach for it. There is no sheet music on this page — that's the point. It's ear training, not reading.
4. Play it back. When the phrase finishes, the metronome keeps going so you have a beat to lean on — there's no count-off; the click you were listening to is the one you come in on. Come in when you're ready: the mic is already open when your turn starts, so your first note's attack is always captured cleanly, and the take is trimmed back to just before your entrance, so your reaction time is discarded rather than scored. (The trim looks for your playing — the click's faint ring in an otherwise quiet room is ignored, so it can't be mistaken for your first note.)
5. Stop playing. After about two seconds of silence, the app decides you're done.
6. Read the score. Your overall percentage lands next to the button, coloured by its grade — Perfect, Great, Good, Fair, or Try Again — with Pitch and Rhythm broken out underneath it. It takes a beat to appear: the number you see is the definitive re-score of the actual recording, not a live estimate (or the live score, in the rare case the recording can't be replayed), and once it's up it never changes. A liner-note caption sits at the bottom of the screen quoting the giants ("right in the pocket," "cookin'," "take it again from the top," and so on). The score stays put until the next one replaces it.
7. Move on, or retry. Above 70% counts as a pass and the loop rolls on to a new phrase. Below that, the same phrase comes round once more so you can take another swing — you don't have to do anything. Miss it a second time and the loop moves on anyway, so you're never stuck on one line.

When your level moves, a small cue flashes under the status line: ↑ Blues · Lv 23. That's the adaptive system telling you it's noticed.

If your playing stays consistently sharp or flat across several phrases and different notes, a quiet “Consistently sharp · check your tuning” (or flat) reminder appears beneath the score. It waits for at least three takes and three different notes, with a typical offset of at least 15 cents. Uncertain detections and wrong notes don't count toward the reminder. It clears when the next take no longer supports it, and starts fresh when you stop and restart practice. The reminder doesn't change your score.

When you pause, a Your tuning panel opens below the score with one fader for every note you played in that run, low to high and in written pitch. A low D and an upper D get separate faders, because on most horns they behave differently. Notes you never played don't appear. The fader sits at the note's typical offset in cents: up is sharp, down is flat, and the shaded strip around 0 is in tune (within 5 cents). Brass means sharp, blue means flat. The faint band on the slot is where most of your takes of that note landed, and the number underneath counts them. A note with fewer than three takes gets an outlined cap: one reading isn't a habit yet. A = 440 measures every note against standard pitch. Your centre subtracts your overall offset, so a note that is out against the rest of your playing stands out. That's the difference between adjusting your mouthpiece (or tuning slide) once and working on one note. A line underneath sums it up. As with the reminder, only clean, correctly pitched notes count, nothing is saved, and the panel starts fresh the next time you press play.

#What you can change, and where

Ear Training has no in-page settings panel — everything it uses comes from the global Settings page, so you set it once and then just play. Under Settings → Ear Training:

What you can't set: the phrase pool. The app draws from the curated catalog plus your own and adopted licks, caps it at your proficiency level in the active scale, filters it for scale compatibility (see below), and shuffles. There's no category, difficulty, or bar-count dial — difficulty is the adaptive system's job. The tonality controls on the main Settings page are the ones that shape what you hear.

#What's on screen while you're playing

The screen is intentionally almost empty:

• Today's key, the scale name, and how many notes that scale has ("5 notes", "7 notes") — the palette you're drawing from.
• The big button: play when idle, stop when running, a spinner while the instrument samples load ("Tuning up…").
• The score from your last take, held until the next one lands.
• The status text, which is your metronome for the loop: Listen… in red while the phrase plays, Your turn — play! in brass once it ends, Listening… once your first note hits. (Red means listen, brass means play — the same two colours mark listen and play everywhere in the app.) Until the app has permission to use your microphone, it reads Tap to start — mic access required. Before your first take the score slot says Score appears after your first take.
• A discreet practice timer in the top-left corner (it appears once you've started), counting the time you've actually spent in the loop.

There's no pitch meter or input-level meter on this page — or anywhere else in the practice rooms. If you want to see what the detector heard on a take — the notes it segmented, their clarity, the onsets — the diagnostics page (/diagnostics, not linked from the nav) replays your saved recordings through the current detector.

#Scale-aware filtering

Not every lick fits every scale. A 7-note major lick squashed into a 5-note pentatonic session would lose two of its notes and stop sounding like itself, so the app filters: in a pentatonic session you only hear pentatonic licks; in a Lydian session, Lydian-compatible ones; and so on (the full table is in The Daily Key). The note count for the active scale shows up in the header (e.g. "5 notes" for pentatonic, "7 notes" for major) so you know what palette you're drawing from.

If filtering would leave you with fewer than three licks at your difficulty, the app widens to all licks at that difficulty — better to practice something than nothing.

#Side B — Lick Practice

This is the 12-key drill. It picks a lick from your tagged collection and runs it through every key it has earned so far over a backing track, scoring each pass — and adds keys, one at a time, until it has all twelve.

#Setting it up

Before your first session, go to Licks and tap + Practice on a few licks you want to drill (or ☆ Add to Practice on a lick's own page). Tagged licks become your Side B practice book. Each tagged lick also needs at least one progression tag — the Practice over pills on its detail page, which say which backing tracks it plays cleanly over. A tag gets seeded for you the first time you set a lick's category, when that category maps cleanly onto a progression (a ii-V-I lick gets ii-V-I major). That is a one-time write, not an ongoing guess: the app never infers a missing tag later, so a lick with no tag stays out of Side B, and a tag you delete stays deleted.

When you open Side B, the setup console has two panels — Session Type on top, Backing & Flow below — and a Start button. The Session Type picker has four choices, and the controls under it change with the type:

• Daily Practice (the default — the button reads Start Daily Practice) ignores the picked progression and rotates across every progression you've tagged licks for, fitting the session into the time budget. Each lick gets paired with whichever of its eligible progressions you've practiced least recently. Use it as your default daily warm-up so every line gets time on the clock.
• Focused Session (Start Session) runs licks tagged for one progression you pick. It's the right choice when you want focused work on one harmonic context.
• Deep Practice (Start Drill) drills a single lick you pick here through its currently-unlocked keys. See Single-Lick Deep Practice below — it's also launchable from the Practice button on a lick's detail page.
• Tricks (Start Trick Drill) — drill a melodic device. Not a lick at all: a formula (enclosures, triad pairs) practiced for fluency rather than exact reproduction. It shares the same session engine, so it feels like Deep Practice with a regenerated phrase each round. See Practicing Tricks.

The knobs and switches:

• Duration (Daily and Focused only) — 3 to 20 minutes. It's a budget, not a promise: the app queues licks until the budget fills, so with a small book the session ends sooner, and the caption under Start tells you what the planned session will actually take. Deep Practice and Tricks have no time budget — they run until you press End.
• Progression (Focused only) — what the backing track plays underneath. Ten of them: minor, major, and dominant vamps (two bars of one chord); short ii-V-I in major and minor (ii and V sharing a bar, then the I); long ii-V-I in major and minor (a bar each, the I held for two); turnaround; iii-VI-ii-V-I; and blues (two bars of the I7 — blues vocabulary, not the whole 12-bar form). A lick is only ever served over a progression its own changes fit (see Lick detail).
• Subs (Focused only, and only on progressions with a dominant chord to substitute on) — lets minor-chord licks join the session over the dominant bars, played a half step up: a minor line over the V's ♭9, the altered colour. Same session, harder harmony.
• Lick (Deep Practice only) — a search box over your practice set to pick the one line to drill (the caption shows how many keys it has unlocked, and a Rotation line lists them), plus a Tempo Bump knob (0.5–5%, 1% by default) that sets how much the tempo climbs each time you clear the whole rotation. The same knob governs Trick Drills.
• Trick and its parameters (Tricks only) — Enclosures use an interactive Phrase canvas: choose the target chord tone, approach pattern, note count, and landing beat directly on the graphic. Practice over offers major/minor/dominant single chords and long ii–V–I in major or minor; tap a chord cell to preview its arrival. Single-chord practice requires an unlocked mastery variant; long progressions accept any valid combination and save their progress separately. Triad pairs retain parameter pads and a Next unlock hint. See Practicing Tricks.
• Backing style — Swing, Bossa Nova, Ballad, or Straight. See The band below for what each one actually plays.
• Mode — Continuous plays the lick once as a demo in the first key, then you play it through the lick's unlocked keys back-to-back over a non-stop backing track. Call & Response skips the upfront demo and instead, in every key, the app plays the lick first and you echo it on the next cycle. Both modes score every key you play.

The Start button briefly shows Loading progress… while saved progress is loading, so practice begins at the lick's saved tempo and unlocked keys.

There is no tempo knob on this screen. Every lick carries its own tempo: a brand-new one opens at 60 BPM, and from there the sessions move it for you. After each lick in a Daily or Focused session, the tempo adjusts on your average score across that lick's keys: +2 BPM at 95%+, +1 BPM at 90%+, -1 BPM in the 75–89% band, and -3 BPM below 75%. A single key scored below 75% blocks any upward adjustment, even if the average looks good. A session that unlocks a new key drops the tempo 10% instead of bumping it — rounded to a whole BPM and never below the 50 BPM floor — so the new key starts with headroom. Deep Practice and Tricks run their own tempo rules, described below. If you want a lick's tempo back where it started, that's Reset Progress on its detail page.

Above the console, a ⚠ line warns you when licks you've tagged for practice have no progression yet — they won't appear in any session until you open them and pick one.

#The band

The rhythm section is generated, not looped: bass, comping (piano or organ, your pick in Settings), and drums, played fresh each time from a seeded engine. It doesn't repeat a two-bar sample at you.

Two things about swing feel are worth knowing:

• The Swing knob in Settings applies to the Swing style only. Bossa Nova, Ballad and Straight each declare their own eighth-note feel — a bossa is straight whatever the knob says — and both you and the band are held to it, because a rhythm section can't be on a different grid from the soloist. So on those three styles the knob does nothing, and Ballad will lean very slightly (0.55) even with the knob at 0.50.
• With the knob at 0.50, Swing chooses its own ratio from the tempo, the way players actually do: deep and loping at slow tempos (about 3.5:1 up to 132 BPM), relaxing toward an even triplet feel by 200, and nearly straight above 240. This applies to the band only — what the scorer expects from you never changes with tempo.

What the drummer does and doesn't do here. In Lick Practice you'll hear the ride and snare conversation, the odd Philly Joe bomb (a lone accented kick off the grid) or a side-stick lean at four-bar boundaries, and the kick catching the piano's pushes. What you won't hear is the big stuff — crashes on section arrivals, setup fills, the long fill over a chorus turn. Those hang off a tune's form, so they only show up in Tune Practice, where the band also builds chorus over chorus.

#What happens during a session

The first lick's chord stack is on screen the moment the session page opens — before the instrument samples have loaded and before the mic is open — so you can read ahead while the app tunes up. If the microphone is refused, the stack is replaced by a Microphone unavailable — check permissions and try again banner rather than standing there silent. Then the session opens with a one-bar count-in — a metronome bar with a thump on 1 and a hi-hat chick on 2 and 4 — and the click stops and the band takes over. (Layering a synthetic click on top of a sampled kit was the loudest fake thing in the mix, so it goes away once there's a real drummer. With Backing switched off in Settings, the click carries on instead.) You see:

• A header with the current lick name, its progression in that progression's colour, where you are in the rotation ("Key 3/7"), and — big, on the right — the key you're playing it in. When Subs has put a lick over a dominant chord, a Minor over Dominant tag says so.
• A stack of charts — one row per upcoming key, with the active row held still while you play. In Daily Practice, sheet-music rows are visible from the start and have the same height as chord-only rows. The active row carries the beat, a recording ring, and a simple action cue: red Listen while the app demonstrates, then brass Play 4 · 3 · 2 · 1 over the demonstration's final bar, and Play during your turn. The cue does not name the next key. The space above the chords remains, without a “Changes” label.
• A key progress ring with your current tempo in the middle, colouring each key as you score it.
• A session timer with a progress bar (Daily and Focused sessions only — Deep Practice and Tricks have no time budget, so there's no countdown).
• An End Session button.

In Daily Practice, the newest unlocked key shows sheet music when its rolling score is below 75%. The line is engraved in your instrument's written pitch, with larger chord symbols above the staff and the current bar marked as you play. Its upcoming row shows the sheet immediately, so you can read ahead. You roll directly into that key, with no reading pause or extra countdown. In continuous mode you play it three times consecutively, with the sheet visible throughout; the tab shows Play · 1/3 through 3/3. Only the third pass counts toward progress and recording history; the first two are rehearsals with score feedback. Call-and-response keeps one answer per key and the Play countdown at the end of each call. The initial count-in and two-bar gap between licks remain.

At 75% or higher the newest key returns to a chord-only row and one pass on its next planned appearance. Never-attempted keys start by ear; earlier learned keys and fully unlocked licks do not reveal notation in Daily. The full sheet remains available on the lick's page.

Deep Practice also shows music for any key, including older keys and licks with all twelve keys unlocked, if your first scored attempt in that key is below 50%, or your latest two scored attempts in that key average below 70%. The next rotation shows eligible sheets immediately, including upcoming keys, with the same readable notation and 128 px row height as Daily. There is no extra reading pause: three sheet passes join continuously. Rehearsal passes do not count toward these thresholds. A final score of at least 95% returns that key to chords and one pass on its next appearance, even if older low scores are still pulling down its average. Only fresh difficulty after that success can bring the sheet back. Without such a success, the existing rolling-score and recent-attempt rules still apply. A change to memory playing gets a preparation bar before recording opens.

You play the lick once per key, with no retries — the one exception being the key you're learning, which gets its three passes in continuous mode. After all of that lick's keys play through, two things happen:

1. Tempo adjusts based on your average score for the lick: +2 BPM at 95%+, +1 BPM at 90%+, -1 BPM in the 75–89% band, -3 BPM below 75%. Any single key under 75% blocks tempo increases but doesn't block decreases — you lose ground on a lick you can't hold together. The gain steps deliberately match the -1 loss step closely, so a lick hovering right at 90% holds its tempo instead of drifting upward on variance alone.
2. The next key may unlock. New keys earn their way into the rotation only when both your average score is at least 90% and the most-recently-added key has been passed cleanly three times (≥ 90% per attempt, one attempt per session). A floor failure (any key below 75%) blocks the unlock outright. Tempo can keep climbing without the rotation growing — so you'll often speed up on the keys you have before the next one appears.

When a key does unlock, the tempo drops 10% instead of taking that session's bump — rounded to a whole BPM, and never below the 50 BPM floor (a lick at 54 lands on 50, not 49). An unlock only ever follows a strong session, so without the drop the brand-new key would arrive faster than the tempo that earned it — instead it arrives with headroom, and you win the speed back as you consolidate the bigger rotation. On the lick's progress chart this reads as a sawtooth: climb, unlock, dip, climb again.

When the session ends you get the Session Report: your overall percentage, keys passed, and minutes practised; then a card per lick with its tempo change, its keys passed and average, and a chip per key coloured the same way as the ring (see the three bands). A lick that averaged in the Try Again band (under 55%) carries a Reset lick button (see below).

The report closes with a single Next card — one recommendation, or none. If you averaged under 75% over eight or more keys it tells you to call it for today. Otherwise it prioritizes weak keys in licks you're still learning (fewer than 12 keys unlocked), then persistently weak keys in fully unlocked licks. It looks at up to five recent sessions for each key: learning keys need scores below 90% in a majority of those sessions, and fully unlocked keys also need at least three weak sessions. Within each group, the typical score (the median) sets the order, so an isolated lapse does not outweigh a consistent weakness. A new learning key can qualify after its first attempt. The card explains the evidence and offers Start deep practice, launching the focus drill on that key alone. When there is no qualifying weakness, it offers no extra drill.

Below it, Upcoming Licks (folded shut) lists your tagged licks, longest-neglected first, with when you last drilled each and a button per progression it's tagged for — tap one to start a Focused session over that progression. New Session takes you back to the setup screen; Home to the dashboard.

#The three bands

What moves Side B forward is where each key's score lands against two lines:

• 90% and up. A clean pass. These keys count toward unlocking the next key and toward tempo bumps. The "all clear" brass halo on the ring only fires when every key in the rotation is at 90% or better.
• 75–89%. Passable but not consolidated. These keys don't block anything from happening — they just don't earn it. You're still in the rotation; nothing decays.
• Under 75%. Below the floor. A single key down here holds the brake on tempo increases and unlocks until you bring it back up. This is the app's way of saying don't move on until you've actually got it.

The colours you see are a finer scale laid over those lines — the same one on the ring, the report chips and the progress page: gold at 95% and up, silver 85–94%, bronze 70–84%, teal 55–69%, and a deep shade under 55%. The two lines don't fall on colour boundaries, so read the percentage when a key sits near 90% or 75%.

In a Daily or Focused session, once you've cycled through every currently-unlocked key for the current lick, the session holds for one more bar before moving on — long enough for that last key's score dot to land on the ring, and, when every key cleared 90%, for the all-clear brass halo to sit there a beat. For that bar the chord stack gives way to a card with the finished lick's average and rating and Next up: the next lick's name (That's the set after the last one); then the chart flips to the next lick. In that gap, with the backing track on, a quick two-chord ii-V comps you into the next lick's first key so your ear is set before its downbeat; the cue is mode-matched — a half-diminished ii into minor tonics, a plain ii-V otherwise. The next lick still starts on the same beat it always did. The session ends when the time budget runs out or every lick has had its turn.

#Single-Lick Deep Practice

Sometimes you don't want the rotation across your tagged book — you just want to own one specific line. Open a lick from your book and hit the Practice button on its detail page (or pick it under Deep Practice on the setup screen), and Side B drills that one lick.

It does not stop. This is the big difference from a standard session. There are no rest bars, no round-complete card, nothing to dismiss. The keys run back to back, and between one cycle and the next the band plays a one-bar ii-V turnaround into the key you're about to play. The music never breaks; you just keep going until you hit End.

How a cycle works:

• The rotation is the lick's own currently-unlocked keys — a brand-new lick starts at its entry key and grows as you earn it, exactly as in a standard session.
• The worst key comes first. Each cycle is re-sorted so the key you've been scoring lowest on over your whole history with this lick plays first. Keys you've never played sit ahead of everything.
• The demo is conditional. The first cycle of a session always opens with the app playing the lick to you. After that, while the head key is still below 90%, the cycle opens with the demo in that key — call and response on precisely the key that needs ear work. Once you're consistently at 90% or better in it, the demo is dropped and cycles run straight into each other. (In Call & Response mode every key has its own call anyway, so there's no separate demo.) And it never plays after a clear: when you've cleared the whole rotation and the tempo steps up, the next cycle opens straight on your worst key, whatever its history says — you just played it. So the app stops talking as soon as you stop needing it to.
• The sheet music is conditional too. Until a successful final turn earns chord-only playing, the newest unlocked key shows notation while its rolling score is below 75%; any key can also receive the recent-attempt help described above. Eligible sheets are visible from the start of the rotation, including upcoming keys, so you can read ahead. Each has three continuous passes (one response in call-and-response), with Play · 1/3 through 3/3. There is no reading pause or countdown between sheet passes or ordinary keys. When the sheet withdraws, the chord chart appears with a brief Play countdown before your next attempt.
• The cues match Daily Practice. Plain Listen has no countdown; Play 4 · 3 · 2 · 1 cues the final bar of the demo or call, then Play stays steady through your turn. The tab does not add another key name. Sheet and chord-only rows have the same height, with the space above the chords preserved and the “Changes” label removed. Deep adds a brief entrance cue when a result changes the tempo, repeats the same key, or removes the sheet.
• Keys you score ≥ 95% on are mastered for the round and drop out of the rotation, so each cycle gets shorter and concentrates on what's left.
• When the last key clears, the round completes: tempo bumps by the Tempo Bump percentage of where it currently sits (1% unless you've changed the knob on the setup screen), rounded up to a whole BPM, and the rotation refills with the full unlocked set.
• The session starts 2% below the lick's saved tempo, and never changes it. You usually arrive here from the report, on the lick that just graded worst — dropping straight back in at the tempo it failed at just repeats the failure, so the drill eases in and you earn the difference back over the first couple of clears. And however far you ramp during the drill, the lick's saved tempo is exactly where you left it when you next meet it in Daily Practice. That's deliberate: one lick with a demo and your worst key first is a different exercise from a dozen licks cold, and a tempo you can hold in the first shouldn't decide the second.
• The backing progression is derived from the lick itself — whichever of its own progression tags you've drilled least recently — so a major lick won't get stuck over a minor vamp because the setup screen happened to be set that way.

The focus drill. The report's Start deep practice recommendation opens on the recommended key alone, 10% below the lick's saved tempo, with the same charts and cues as standalone Deep. Clear it at 95% and the tempo steps up by the bump percent; come in under 75% and it steps down by three times that; anything in between holds. Only the opening round has a demo. Each score-dependent result gets one unscored preparation bar, showing the resolved chart with a plain Play countdown. The cue omits “from memory” and BPM; tempo remains in its usual display. Sheet music adds no extra pause.

After you actually clear the saved tempo, the cue announces once more and you repeat that key once while the promised next chart is visible underneath, including its sheet if needed. That promised row becomes active directly even if the extra repeat scores poorly. The finished key and its score scroll out as the previewed chart moves to the top. Regular Deep uses the same movement at key changes and cycle rebuilds; same-key retries stay still. No completed row remains parked above the active chart. The other keys return one per cleared rotation, weakest first, with the tempo held, until the full unlocked set is back. The header shows Focus and then Rebuilding; the report records the tempo and round milestones. Starting Deep from the lick's page or setup still opens on the full unlocked rotation. Neither entry path changes the lick's saved Daily tempo.

The end-of-session report is where the rounds show up: how many you completed, the tempo you reached (and where the session started), a reminder of the tempo the lick stays saved at for Daily Practice, and a line per round listing which keys you mastered at which BPM.

#When a lick keeps beating you

The session already does the gentle thing on its own: the key you're learning shows its sheet music, three passes at a time in continuous mode, while you're holding it under 75% (see What happens during a session). Reset is for when reading the line isn't the problem.

Side B is happy to grow with you. It's less helpful when a single lick has slipped so far that its current state — the keys it's unlocked, the tempo it's anchored to — doesn't match where you are anymore.

For that, the lick's detail page in your book shows ↺ Reset Progress once the lick has practice history, and the post-session report offers Reset lick beside any lick that averaged in the Try Again band (under 55%). Either asks you to confirm. Reset wipes that lick's per-key scores, its unlock count (back to one key — its home key), and resets the tempo to 60 BPM. Your tags stay; the lick stays in your practice book; only the progress against it clears. Use it when you've been stuck for weeks on a line you should be able to drill at a kinder pace.

Use Deep Practice when there's a single line you want to drill into your fingers in one sitting. Use Daily Practice (or a Focused session) when you want to spread time across everything you've tagged.

#Phases of expertise

Every lick you drill sits in one of four phases. The progress chart on its detail page names the phase you're in and draws the phases as bands, so you can see what the next one costs:

Coverage comes first: a lick you can rip at 160 in three keys is still new, because the point of the 12-key cycle is that you've actually heard the line everywhere. Once the twelfth key lands, the phase is purely a question of tempo, and reaching a threshold promotes you — a bump that lands exactly on 120 is the promotion it looks like.

Phases are a mirror, not a gate. Nothing about them changes what Side B schedules, how keys unlock, or how tempo moves.

#Why gradual unlocks

The 12-key cycle is the goal, not the start. A brand-new lick starts with just one key — its home key — and earns each next key in easiest-to-hardest order by accidental count, alternating sharps and flats from home. From C, that's: C, G (1♯), F (1♭), D (2♯), Bb (2♭), A (3♯), Eb (3♭), E (4♯), Ab (4♭), B (5♯), Db (5♭), F♯/G♭ (6). For other home keys, the same principle applies relative to the entry key.

This means new vocabulary stays musical from day one: you're consolidating the shapes that matter most before the rotation grows, and by the time you reach the trickiest keys you've already heard the line in every easier one.

#Why all 12 keys

The shortest answer: every jazz player you admire could play their vocabulary in any key. Coltrane drilled patterns through every key before recording Giant Steps. Practicing only in the comfortable keys means your fingers have memorized one shape; practicing in all 12 means you've actually heard the line.

The longer answer is in The Daily Key.

#Your licks

The Licks page is your practice book. It shows the licks you are working with — the ones you’ve written in the editor, recorded, or stolen from the community. The hundreds of curated ear-training licks the app uses to feed Side A live behind the scenes; the Licks page is for your stuff. (An empty book says so, with a button to add your first lick.)

#Three sections

The page is organised into three groups, in this order:

• Needs setup — licks you've tagged for practice that don't yet carry a progression tag. Side B can't schedule them yet. Open the lick and pick which progressions it should drill over (you can pick more than one).
• Practice set — fully-configured practice licks, the one you drilled most recently first. Each card has a Remove button to take it out of the set.
• Other licks — everything else of yours that you haven't tagged for practice. Each card has a + Practice button to tag it.

#Reading a lick card

The cards are compact on purpose — the point is to scan a book, not read one card. Each shows:

• The lick's name, and by whom if you adopted it from the community.
• A category pill tinted in its progression's colour. Every progression has an identity hue, and it follows the lick everywhere: the pill here, the dots beside it, the session header while you're drilling it, and the bands on a tune chart when it turns up as a suggestion. A ii-V looks like a ii-V wherever you meet it.
• Colour dots for any additional progressions the lick is tagged for.
• The lick's current practice tempo in BPM — where Side B has got you to on this line.
• Its free-text tags.
• A play button, top right.

#Search and filter

The search box filters across all three groups by name or tag. A progression filter narrows to licks carrying a given progression tag — the fast way to answer "what have I got for turnarounds?" The category and difficulty browse filters that used to live on this page have been retired; they belonged to the old "browse the whole catalog" page, and now that your book is the focus, search plus progression is enough.

Two buttons sit at the top right. + Add a lick opens a chooser with the two ways in — Record a line from your horn or write one in the Editor (see Adding your own licks). Browse Community opens the licks other players have shared: search by name, narrow by category, author or a maximum difficulty, sort by Popular or Newest, play any of them, and Steal one to adopt it into your book (or Favorite it to come back later). An adopted lick lands under Other licks with the author's name on it, ready to tag; Return (on its card here, or on the community page) hands it back. Community browsing needs you to be signed in.

#Lick detail

Tap a lick to see:

• Sheet music in your instrument's key, with the key (Key: D minor) and the chord changes written out underneath.
• A key selector so you can preview the lick in any of the 12 keys before tagging it. The pills are tonics in the lick's own mode — a minor lick reads D- · G- · C- … and its chart carries the minor key signature (D minor shows one flat), so you never have to think in the relative major.
• Category (on licks you own, tap it to change it — the progression tags re-seed to match), the difficulty band and level (Moderate (34)), bar count, and tags.
• A progress chart once you've drilled it — your tempo on this line over time, banded by phase of expertise, with a small key marking every session that unlocked a new key. The x-axis is scaled by real elapsed time, so a three-month gap reads as a gap rather than as one step.
• A play button so you can hear it without dropping into a session.
• A practice star — ☆ Add to Practice tags the lick for Side B; it reads ★ Practice Set once it's in (tap again to take it out).
• A Practice button to drop straight into single-lick Deep Practice.
• Practice over pills — the progression tags telling Side B which backing tracks this lick is eligible for. Tap to add or remove. Pills the lick can't play over are greyed out, and hovering one gives the reason — the chord changes don't match, it's too long for the progression, it's the wrong chord for the lick's role, or the wrong mode for its key (a 3-bar ii-V-i doesn't fit the half-bar Short ii-V-I template; a cadence lick doesn't fit a vamp; a lick you've marked Minor doesn't go over the major vamp). Setting a category seeds only the progressions the lick's own chord changes fit, and a stale tag that no longer fits is marked ⚠ so you can remove it — Side B never serves a lick over changes that don't resemble its own. The minor ii-V-I templates play iiø7 → V7(♭9) → i-7 (Eø7 | A7♭9 | D-7 in D minor).
• An Edit button (step-entered, owned licks only) to reopen the lick in the staff editor.
• A ↺ Reset Progress action once you've actually drilled the lick — wipes scores and unlock count back to a fresh start, after a Confirm Reset. See Side B above.
• A Delete button for licks you authored. If the delete is blocked (a community copy of someone else's, for example), the page now tells you why inline instead of just hiding the button.

#Your tunes

The Tunes page is the other half of your library: whole song forms rather than one- and two-bar lines. Charts you wrote by hand, charts you imported (iReal Pro links, Band-in-a-Box songs, MuseScore scores, or a PDF the app reads for you), and charts you adopted from the community all shelve under Your book; the ones that ship with the app shelve under Curated.

Open a tune and you can read it in any written key, hear its melody, and — the part that matters — practice licks over it, with the rhythm section playing the form. The app reads the changes, finds the ii-Vs and turnarounds and vamps hiding in them, and hands you those spots to fill with licks from your book.

Two pages cover this properly:

• Your Tunes — the book, the five ways to add a tune, the editor, and sharing.
• Playing Over Tunes — the scored session: modes, strictness, the head rule, and what the report tells you.

Tune-practice takes deliberately don't count toward your streak, your level, or your Side B unlocks. That's the applying-it room; the drilling rooms are Side A, Side B and Tricks.

#Progress

The Progress page is the back cover. It tells you what's been happening over time, in two tabs.

Progress, top to bottom:

• Day Streak, Tonal Mastery (with how many of the 12 scales and 12 keys you've started), and Recent Sessions as headline numbers, over a Beginner-to-Virtuoso bar showing where your mastery sits.
• This Period — the current week or month (there's a toggle) against the one before it: sessions, practice days, average score, pitch and rhythm, each with its change, so you can see whether you're actually putting more in.
• Trends — your Tonal Mastery (average proficiency across all 12 scales and 12 keys, with unattempted ones counting as zero; 0–100), plotted over a window from one week to all time.
• Practice Calendar — every day you practiced, lit by session count. Skipped days are dim.
• Scale Proficiency — a level bar per scale type you've practiced, with its attempt count; tap a scale and its level-over-time chart expands in place beneath it.
• Keys & Scales — how many of the 12 keys and 12 scale types you've unlocked, and exactly what the next unlock requires (Next: G — C ≥ 10 (now 4)).
• By Key — your average ear-training score and attempt count in each key, so you can see which keys still need work.
• A small Reset Progress link at the foot — the same full reset as in Settings, with a confirmation.

Sessions has two sub-tabs. Ear Training lists your recent takes with grade, phrase, key, score and date; expand one for the pitch and rhythm split, notes hit, tempo, and the note-by-note comparison — what was written, what you played, each note's pitch and rhythm score and how early or late it landed, spelled the way the chart spelled it (a written-C blues lists Eb, Gb and Bb, not D#, F# and A#) — and play the saved recording back, or the lick itself. Lick Practice lists your Side B and trick sessions with their average, progression, mode, keys passed and length; expand one for every lick's key chips, and tap a chip to see that key's note-by-note detail when its recording was kept.

Tricks and Side B sessions count toward your streak and the calendar, but the Progress page has no per-trick view — that lives on each trick's own page.

#Settings

The global Settings page controls things that aren't specific to a single session.

Session settings that belong to a session aren't here: session type, progression, backing style and practice mode are set on the Lick Practice page, and mode / strictness / head / key / tempo / backing style on the tune-practice setup screen.

The settings page is laid out as a studio console — knobs, rocker switches, and selector pads rather than form fields. Every control has the same keyboard and screen-reader behaviour as the plain input it replaces.

#Scales

The Scales page (from the dashboard's link row, or /scales) is a reading reference, not a practice room: twenty core scales grouped by family — major modes, pentatonic, blues, bebop, melodic minor, harmonic minor, symmetric — each with its degree formula (1 2 b3 4 5 6 b7 for Dorian). There are no keys on it; the formula is the same in all twelve. The full catalog of 33, with the chords each one works over, is in Scales & Lick Categories.

#Docs

Docs in the nav opens these pages inside the app, with a sidebar index you can search (Search docs…). An Ask AI button — in the sidebar, and floating in the corner — opens the Mankunku Assistant, a chat that answers questions about the app from this documentation, with the page you're reading in view. It starts you off with a few questions ("How does the scoring system work?", "What does 'tagged' mean?"); type your own in Ask the assistant…. It needs the server to have an AI key configured; without one the box reads Assistant unavailable and the pages still work as plain reading. Many pages also carry a small docs link in their corner that opens the matching page here.

#Adding your own licks

Two ways in.

• The editor (/licks/editor) — note by note, like writing on staff paper. Pick a duration, pick a pitch (sharp, flat, or natural), and the cursor moves on. It all works from the keyboard too: 1–5 whole to sixteenth, T triplet, . dotted, A–G a note, 0 a rest, [ / ] flat / sharp, = / - octave up / down, + a tied note. Fumbled a note four beats back? Click its notehead — or step to it with ←/→ — to select it, then fix it in place: nudge the pitch with ↑/↓ (Shift for an octave), delete it with Backspace/Delete, or flip its spelling with \, all without retyping the rest. Rests are selectable and deletable the same way (MuseScore-style); pitch operations on a rest simply do nothing. A status line under the staff tells you the bar and beat you're on and how many beats are left. Type the lick's name on the staff itself; as you enter notes the app may offer Name suggestions — famous lines yours resembles — which you can click to use, but they're guesses, not verified attributions. The Setup row holds the key, the Major | Minor control and the bar count (1–4); the Details row holds the category pills, the Practice star, and (until you tap Got it) a note that saved licks are shared with the community. Play it back, then Save. If the lick is already in the library, the editor says so and the button becomes Steal: you adopt the existing one rather than making a duplicate.
• Record (/licks/record) — play a phrase on your horn, the app transcribes the notes from the recording. Useful for capturing something you just figured out. Set the tempo first (the − / + buttons, 40–240 BPM in steps of 5; 100 to start), then press the red record button: you get a two-bar count-in of woodblock tocks with a cue pill counting you down (Count in, then Play in 4…3…2…1), and the metronome's drum-kit click — kick on the downbeat, ride on the other beats, hi-hat chick on 2 and 4 — takes over exactly where the tocks stop. That change of sound is your entrance, so come in on that downbeat; the kit keeps time under you for the whole take (headphones keep it out of the recording). The note you're playing shows big on screen while the tape rolls (On tape…). Play the lick, then stop with the button or just go quiet for a couple of seconds. The transcription understands jazz time: swung eighths come out written as straight eighths (the convention on every lead sheet), and a genuine triplet is still recognised beat by beat, so one bar can hold both. On the review screen you get the transcription on a staff with its difficulty and bar count, a Name box, Play Back (which re-applies your Swing setting — 0.62 out of the box — so the take sounds the way you played it, not the way it's spelled), Re-record if it isn't right, and Save to Book.

Either way, your lick joins your book alongside your other licks — ones you recorded, wrote, or adopted from the community — and behaves the same way: it can be tagged for Side B, transposed to any key, played back, and scored.

#Minor licks in the editor

The Setup row has a Major | Minor toggle beside the key. Pick D and Minor and the staff draws one flat, typing B gives B♭ and typing C stays natural — no more entering a D-minor line "in F". The mode follows the category you choose (a ii-V-I minor lick turns minor on its own) until you set it yourself, and it's saved with the lick, so the detail page, the practice session and the progress page all read it as D minor. A lick you entered in the relative major before this existed: open it and tap Read as D minor — the key relabels and the notes stay exactly where they are (changing the key with Move notes on would transpose them a third).

#Editing a step-entered lick

Editor-written licks are editable after the fact. Open the lick from your book and an Edit button shows up (only for licks you authored in the editor — recorded-from-mic licks aren't editable in the staff editor). Editing reopens the lick in the same editor flow with all your notes pre-loaded. Change anything you want — durations, pitches, name, category, bar count — and hit Update. The same lick id is preserved (so your practice history sticks with it), and changing the category re-seeds the progression tags so the lick lines up with the new harmonic context.

#Tips that keep showing up

• Start slow. A clean Good at 80 BPM teaches your ear more than a stumbled Try Again at 140.
• Listen, don't shadow. Wait for the phrase to land before reaching for your horn — half of ear training is receiving the phrase, not playing it.
• Use the metronome. Rhythm is 40% of your score. The click is your friend.
• Repeat the hard ones. Try Again is a feature, not a punishment. A missed phrase comes round once more before the loop moves on — and a lick that keeps beating you on Side B is what Deep Practice is for.
• All 12 keys. Your book lets you transpose any lick to any key — work through the cycle of fifths, even on Side A.
• Watch your tuning. The score carries a small in-tune bonus, and a note more than a quarter-tone off is scored as the wrong note. Fix the room temperature, fix the embouchure, fix your reed; the score will rise on its own.
• Put the vocabulary in a tune. A lick you can play in 12 keys and can't find on a real form isn't finished. Chart or import a standard and run Tune Practice over it — the app will show you exactly where your lines fit.
• Drill the devices, not just the lines. A lick is one solution; a trick is the machine that generates a hundred of them. Ten minutes of enclosures or triad pairs will show up in your playing faster than a new lick will.
• Take the tour. Most main pages have a guided walk-through — the home page, Ear Training, Lick Practice, Licks, Tunes, and tune practice. Each offers itself until you've taken it (a Take a quick tour? banner on the home page, a link such as Need help? Take the tour or How your book works on the others; tune practice's How this works link is always there), and Settings → Tours & Help replays any of them whenever you want.