About CleanSpeed

It all started with me practicing guitar while keeping a spreadsheet of exercises, dates, and tempos, adding +1 BPM for the next practice.

It was consistent and it worked. But after about a month of training like this, I would simply burn out and stop practicing for months. Then I would come back, fall back to my old tempos, and basically spend years going in circles.

Another annoying part of this approach was changing the metronome tempo manually for every exercise. And sometimes I had 20+ exercises.

Then I had the idea to make my practice more varied and hopefully more effective by playing exercises at different speeds, starting slowly and finishing much faster than I would normally play, giving my hands a chance to get used to the speed even if it didn't sound perfect yet.

And that immediately created another problem: figuring out the right tempos.

Sure, if your starting tempo is 100 BPM, calculating 60%, 80%, 110%, or 130% is easy.

But what if your tempo is 114 BPM?

Now you need a calculator.

At some point I thought it would be nice to find a metronome that would let me quickly switch between percentages of a set tempo.

I couldn't find one.

That's how the original idea for CleanSpeed appeared: a simple metronome where you set your base speed and can quickly switch between percentages of it.

Then I remembered my old practice routine, the spreadsheet with exercises and tempos, and thought: why not automate the whole process?

That's how Exercises and Sessions appeared.

In an exercise, you can set a CleanSpeed and a pattern: a sequence of steps, each with its own timer and percentage of the original CleanSpeed.

A Session is simply a group of exercises you already created, played one after another.

After each exercise, you can rate how it went and decide on a new CleanSpeed.

And that's basically it.

Very simple.

This is just my own way of thinking about practice and the way I practice myself. I originally made this app for me, but I'll be happy if there are other people who like this approach and want to use it too.

One more thing

Oh, and one more thing, probably the most important thing other metronomes don't have.

I attached a database to it.

So your history, exercises, and sessions are stored there and can be available from different devices.

At least until I forget to pay for the database, haha.

Right now

CleanSpeed is still in testing.

I mostly use the desktop version myself.

If you prefer practicing on your phone, I recommend using the PWA version.

A PWA is basically the website installed on your phone like an app. It opens from your Home Screen and feels much closer to a normal app than using it in a browser tab.

iPhone

Open CleanSpeed in Safari → tap Share → Add to Home Screen.

Android

Open CleanSpeed in Chrome → open the browser menu → choose Install app or Add to Home screen.

Thanks!

Stan