#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 third surface where you apply what they teach you 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 you land on the home page. It's the front cover of the LP. 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 in Side A's settings.
• See your current level (1–100) on the active scale, plus the count of licks you've tagged for Side B.

If today is your first day, you won't have a streak or a level yet. Hit Side A and start.

#Side A — Ear Training

This is the call-and-response loop.

#The flow, beat by beat

1. Pick up your horn. Make sure the mic is hot — the bottom of the screen shows a green indicator and an input level meter when it's getting signal.
2. Press play. The app plays a phrase through your speakers (or headphones), with a metronome ticking underneath. Sheet music for the phrase appears above the transport bar, written in your instrument's key.
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.
4. Play it back. When the phrase finishes, the metronome keeps going so you have a beat to lean on. Play the phrase as you heard it. The app starts recording the moment your first note registers.
5. Stop playing. After about two seconds of silence, the app decides you're done.
6. Read the score. A grade lands on the screen — Perfect, Great, Good, Fair, or Try Again — with a per-note table showing which notes you got and how close your timing was. A liner-note caption underneath quotes the giants ("right in the pocket," "cookin'," "take it again from the top," and so on).
7. Move on, or retry. Above 70% counts as a pass: hit play and you'll get a new phrase. Below that, the same phrase replays so you can take another swing.

#What you can change in Side A settings

#What's on screen while you're playing

• The pitch meter shows the note you're holding right now, how many cents flat or sharp, and a clarity dot that tells you the detector is locked on. If the dot's dim or jumping, your mic isn't picking up a clean signal — get closer to the bell, or check the room noise.
• The mic status bar shows input level. Stay out of the red.
• The status text tells you what to do: Listen while the phrase plays; Your turn once it ends; Listening once your first note hits and recording starts.

#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 see pentatonic licks; in a Lydian session you see Lydian-compatible licks; and so on. 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 too few 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 over a backing track, scoring each pass.

#Setting it up

Before your first session, go to Licks and tap the star on a few licks you want to drill. Tagged licks become your Side B practice book. Each tagged lick also needs at least one progression tag (prog:*) — those are added automatically when the lick's category matches a progression (a ii-V-I lick gets prog:ii-V-I-major), and you can add or remove them by hand from the lick's detail page to drill the same line over a different progression.

When you open Side B, you choose:

• Progression type — what the backing track plays underneath. Ten of them: minor, major, and dominant vamps; short ii-V-I in major and minor; long ii-V-I in major and minor; turnaround; iii-VI-ii-V-I; and blues. Each lick's category determines which progressions it lands cleanly on by default.
• Substitutions — toggle to introduce tritone subs and chromatic approaches. Same lick, harder harmony.
• Backing style — swing for straight-ahead, bossa for Latin, ballad for slow with sustained comping, straight for rock/funk feel.
• Practice mode — Continuous plays the lick once as a demo in the first key, then you play it through all 12 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, alternating through all 12 keys. Both modes score every key the user plays.
• Tempo — starting BPM for this lick. After each lick, the tempo adjusts based on your average score across that lick's keys: +2 BPM at 95%+, +1 BPM at 90%+, -1 BPM in the 75–89% yellow band, and -3 BPM below 75%. A single key scored below 75% blocks any upward adjustment, even if the average looks good.

A single Start button sits at the bottom of the setup screen. Its label changes to match the Session Type you pick at the top of the screen, which offers three modes:

• Focused Session (the button reads Start Session) runs licks tagged for the progression you picked above. It's the right choice when you want focused work on one harmonic context.
• Daily Practice (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 same 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.
• Deep Practice (the button reads 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.

#What happens during a session

The session opens with a count-in, then the backing track starts. You see:

• The current lick name and the key you're playing it in.
• A chord chart above the staff showing the progression cycle, with the active cell highlighted as the bars roll.
• A key progress ring showing how far you are through this lick's currently-unlocked keys.
• A preview strip of the next two or three keys coming up.
• A session timer with a progress bar.

You play the lick once per key, with no retries. 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% yellow 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.

#The traffic-light tiers

The key progress ring and the post-session card both colour each key by how it scored:

• Green (≥ 90%). A clean pass. Green keys count toward unlocking the next key and toward tempo bumps. The "all clear" brass glow on the ring only fires when every key in the rotation is green.
• Yellow (75–89%). Passable but not consolidated. Yellow keys don't block anything from happening — they just don't earn it. You're still in the rotation; nothing decays.
• Red (< 75%). Below the floor. A single red key 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.

Once the session has cycled through every currently-unlocked key for the current lick, the finished lick holds on screen for one more bar — long enough for that last key's score dot to actually land, and, when every key came up green, for the all-clear brass glow to sit there a beat — before the chart flips to the next tagged 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, hit the Practice button on its detail page, and Side B launches in single-lick mode (also called Deep Practice in the session header).

It works the same as a normal session but pinned to one lick:

• The same per-lick unlocked-key set is used as in a standard session — a brand-new lick starts at its entry key and grows as you earn it. (Earlier builds rotated through every unlocked tonality globally; that's no longer the case.)
• Each round cycles through the unlocked keys for that lick. Keys you score ≥ 95% on are marked mastered for the round and drop from the rotation.
• When all unlocked keys are mastered, the round completes: tempo bumps by 5 BPM and the rotation refills.
• The progression and substitution settings are derived from the lick itself — its own prog:* tags pick the backing harmony, so a major lick won't get stuck over a minor vamp because the setup screen happened to be set that way.

#When a lick keeps beating you

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, both the post-session report and the lick’s detail page in your book show a ↺ Reset progress action when the lick has practice history. 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 a standard Start 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, and the progress chart on its detail page draws them as bands so you can see which one you're in and 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 5 BPM 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, stolen from the community, plus anything you've added to your practice set from the broader catalog. 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.

#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, sorted by least-recently-practiced so the most overdue line sits at the top.
• Other licks — everything else of yours that you haven't tagged for practice.

#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 prog:* 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.

#Lick detail

Tap a lick to see:

• Sheet music in your instrument's key.
• A key selector so you can preview the lick in any of the 12 keys before tagging it.
• Category, difficulty, 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 — tap to tag the lick for Side B.
• A Practice button to drop straight into single-lick Deep Practice.
• Practice over pills — the prog:* tags telling Side B which backing tracks this lick is eligible for. Tap to add or remove.
• 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. 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 it with the rhythm section, and — the part that matters — practice licks over it. The app reads the changes, finds the ii-Vs and turnarounds and vamps hiding in them, and hands you those spots to fill from your own practice set.

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 and Side B.

#Progress

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

• Calendar heatmap — every day you practiced, lit by session count. Skipped days are dim.
• Trend chart — your Tonal Mastery (average proficiency across all 12 scales and 12 keys, with unattempted ones counting as zero; 0–100), plotted over the rolling window.
• Streak — consecutive days you've practiced.
• By Key grid — your average score in each key, so you can see which keys still need work.
• Recent sessions — last few attempts with phrase, key, tempo, score, and grade.

#Settings

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

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.

#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. 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 ↑/↓, delete it with Backspace/Delete, or flip its spelling with \, all without retyping the rest. Add rests, set the bar count, save the phrase, and tag it for practice if you want to drill it.
• 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.

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.

#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. The same phrase will replay until you pass.
• 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 pitch meter shows you flat or sharp in real time. 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.
• Take the tour. Every main page has a guided walk-through. They run once automatically, and Settings → Tours & Help replays any of them whenever you want.