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 with a greeting built from your profile and your recent session summaries: one sentence of acknowledgement, one specific proposal. If you're brand new, it will ask enough to get oriented — skill level, what you're working on — and store the answers in your profile so it never has to ask again.

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 auto-greeting doesn't count, and neither do drill results or ending a session. Once a session is started, everything inside it is unlimited: as many drills, questions, and practice-plan requests as you want. A session isn't a fixed length of time; it's one conversation.

If a technical failure interrupts the coach's response, the session isn't counted — metering happens only after a successful reply.

Pro removes the cap entirely. During early access, 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.