Riffshed vs Improvy

Riffshed is a practice journal for jazz musicians, built on the card system. See whether you're actually getting better — or just spending more time with the instrument. THREE PHASES. ONE CARD. Every exercise is a card that moves through three phases — Explore, Integrate, Master — each with its own color and rep counter. You decide when a card is ready to move forward; Riffshed remembers when it did and how long it stayed in each phase. REPS, NOT MINUTES A timer rewards sitting with the instrument. A rep counter rewards doing the work: running a phrase through twelve keys, taking a head clean. Minutes are still tracked — but reps are the unit you optimize. FOCUS BLOCKS A 20/5 focus cycle tuned for instrumental practice: twenty minutes on one card, five minutes of mandatory break. Both intervals are configurable; the open-ended mode drops the clock entirely for jams and lessons. START FROM ANYWHERE (new in 1.1) A Home Screen widget starts a session in one tap and shows today's minutes, your streak and the weekly goal. The live timer follows you to the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island — pause and finish without unlocking; the session saves itself. Map practice to the Action Button, ask Siri, or add a Control Center switch. A METRONOME YOU'LL ACTUALLY USE Full-screen metronome with pendulum, subdivisions and swing. Configure click and accent per beat and per subdivision: silence the "and" of 2, accent any sixteenth, build polyrhythm grids. EVERYTHING LIVES IN THE CARD Notes, target tempo, separate rep counters per phase, PDF sheet music that opens full-screen (pages flip with a swipe while the metronome keeps playing), and one-tap links out to iReal Pro, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and more. SEE A YEAR OF WORK A calendar heatmap of your practice. Tap any day to see what you played, for how long, and which cards moved forward. CURATED LIBRARIES TO START Jazz Piano Fundamentals (67 cards ordered by difficulty) and iReal Pro — Essential Standards (30 standards with deep links) are pre-installed. Build your own libraries, or import a curriculum a teacher shared as a single file. YOUR DATA IS YOURS Fully offline. Full JSON backup including scores. Library export and import in one tap. No account, no ads. Free. Built for daily practice — for iPhone and iPad.

You want to improvise without thinking about it. Not scales. Not the licks you already own. The line you actually hear, played the moment you hear it. Your ear is not what is stopping you. You can hear where the phrase wants to go. What stops you is the half second in between: the one where you work out that the note you want is the flat three, while the chord underneath has already moved on. Fluency is not knowledge. It is speed. And speed only comes from repeating exactly the right thing, thousands of times. That is all Improvy is. A degree appears, you tap the note. Two seconds. Again. Until the number, the sound and the note stop being three thoughts and become one. It works in all 12 major keys, and it spells every one of them the way a musician actually writes it. In Eb the flat two is Fb, not E. Most apps quietly get that wrong, and the habit you build on top of it is wrong too. Train it in both directions, because they are two different skills. Number to note. Note to number. Then the one that turns a melody into changes: this note is the sharp eleven, so what is the chord? There is a Daily Challenge every morning, and Pocket Mode runs with the screen off, so a walk counts as practice. This is not for beginners. It is for players who already know the theory and are tired of being a beat behind it. No ads. No account. Pro is a one-time payment. Stop counting. Start playing!