Mujo: Practice Music

It’s always risky buying a new app site unseen. I can see that there are mostly five star ratings and the screenshots looked pretty cool. It also appeared to combine a number things relating to practice - note taking, metronome, and tracking. I also liked the idea that different components of practice such as scales could be tracked. I hope Jon the developer is reading this because I would love to see him improve on the following: 1. Make the app more intuitive. It’s very difficult to understand how to create notes within a practice session that are different notes than those you can create for practice items. 2. Add a calendar or allow the app to interface with a native calendar such as iCal or Google. 3. Add a recording feature that allows practice items to include recorded clips or those items or practice session components such as vibrato or scales. Add some basic instructions somewhere. I spent way too much of my practice time trying to do simple things and I am tech forward so I’m pretty good at trying to figure things out without a great deal of assistance. Disappointing in its current form. Could love it if it gets improvements that any music student would look for in an app of this kind.

I’ve been using Mujo for one full week now, and I don’t think I’ve ever been excited for an app. Before the review, a fact: since using this app I’ve practiced at a minimum of 2 - 3 hours a day for the last week, after decades of never coming close to that time. And the practice has been more focused and organized. This thing has some kind of Pavlovian magic – gets you in the zone to practice, it gamefies the process, and it is very neat and intuitive. It remembers your metronome tempo settings for anything you are working on, and gives you a visualization of what you worked on, how long, etc. Very satisfying to use, and kind of addicting. This app also is cut from very different cloth than the typical journaling apps with clunky interfaces, over engineered and crammed with so much functionality that you’d be better off just using a small notebook. It gives the user credit for having intuition, and seems to understand how a person will interact with the functionality: Mujo as a journaling app stands out in that the basic interface is as barebones as possible, which works out of the package so elegantly, but the user can “discover” new features by exploring and experimenting (and expand your interface! This is so cool). I’m seriously considering using this app for work timetracking I love the interface so much.

I’ve been using Mujo for several months consistently and it has been the only practice tracking method I've been able to stick with. It is fast and simple, while allowing me to track individual exercises so I can track not just how long I practice but what I practice. Within each exercise, I am able to quickly add notes to help me track different variations to ensure that I’m not spending too much or too little time on any one variation. It’s also helping me even out my practice so I don’t tire myself out on exercises or an etude before I start my repertoire work. And it’s very handy to have a metronome always at the ready, without changing apps or even changing screens. I’ve used other practice trackers and felt they were cumbersome or only tracked the session as a whole. Mujo is the app I’ve been looking for. And as some very conscious about data privacy, I love that the app collects no data.