Practice sessions

A session is the basic unit of coaching in Strumly. This page walks through the full lifecycle — what happens when you start, what counts as using a session, how drills are scored, and what the coach keeps when you're done.

Starting a session

Go to /coach. Strumly resolves your current open session (or creates one) and gives it a real URL — every conversation is addressable, and past sessions load from your history in the sidebar.

The coach opens without spending a model call: it brings forward your exact measured assignment, target tempo, and number to beat. If you're brand new, the first real exchange gets oriented around your level and goal, then stores what matters in your profile.

What counts as a "session"

On the free tier you get 3 sessions per calendar month. A session is consumed by your first genuine message in a conversation; the automatic greeting doesn't count. Each focused session stays open for up to two hours and includes up to eight coached responses. Questions, submitted drill results, plans, and the session-end summary share those responses, but they do not consume another monthly session.

If the provider fails before a response begins, the reserved Free session is released. If you abandon the request or a failure happens after provider work begins, that session may still count; your saved profile and measured drill history are never erased.

Pro includes up to 200 coached responses in each rolling 30-day period. Coaching is paced at up to 12 responses per hour and 20 per day, and the focused-session boundary remains so each conversation ends with saved evidence and a clear next assignment. See Account & billing for current availability.

Running drills

The core drill type is the chord-change drill. The coach picks (or you request) a pair of chords, a target tempo, and a number of bars. The drill card counts you in, and the pattern is: hold the first chord for a beat, then land the second chord on the next downbeat, repeating each bar.

Your microphone feeds a local analysis engine (see How the AI coach works for the details), which detects the chords you're actually playing and measures when each transition lands relative to the beat. When the drill finishes you get:

• Success rate — the fraction of transitions that landed within the timing window.
• Timing score — how close to the beat your successful transitions were.
• Per-transition offsets — each transition's distance from the target beat in milliseconds, signed: positive is late, negative is early.

The coach reads these numbers and responds to them specifically. Consistently late? It'll tell you to start forming the next shape earlier. Random scatter? Probably a tempo problem — it'll drop the BPM. This tight loop — play, measure, adjust, repeat — is the whole point of drilling with live scoring.

Tips for clean scoring:

• Play in a reasonably quiet room. The chromagram analysis is robust, but a TV in the background adds noise.
• Let chords ring. Muted or heavily damped strums give the detector less to work with.
• An acoustic guitar or a clean electric tone works best. Heavy distortion smears the pitch content the detector relies on.

Practice plans

Ask the coach for a plan and it renders a structured practice-plan card — labeled items with durations, totaling your available time. You can save the plan and work through it. This is useful when you want the session to produce something you can execute during the week without opening the coach every day. For the thinking behind a good plan, read How to design a practice routine.

Ending a session

Tell the coach you're done (or use the end-session control). Before saying goodbye it writes two things to your session log:

• A summary of what you actually worked on, including drill results.
• A next-session focus — the specific thing to start with next time.

These two records are what make the next session continuous with this one. You can review past sessions from the sidebar at any time.

Streaks

Strumly tracks a practice streak — the days you've practiced, with a handful of badges for milestones. It's deliberately quiet: a small indicator in the header, honest data, no confetti. The streak log is stored locally in your browser, so it's per-device and works without an account.