Introducing Scale Study

When I have a hobby, I procrastinate and make apps about them. Given that approach led to a successful app in Value Study... let's try another.

Scale Study, available on iOS, is a piano scales practice app for people who worry they will just be reinforcing mistakes the more they practice. It works over MIDI as you play, recording which scales you can get through cleanly, and how fast. Over time you end up with a diary of your music practice.

The powerful thing about Scale Study is the focus on scale over time over tempo, meaning you get a really useful overview of your level. You can see that on C Major you can go at X speed accurately but on D Minor at Y speed.

I built it because I kept running into the same problem with my own practice: the sessions where I feel like I'm improving and the sessions where I actually am don't always line up. Scales in particular are the kind of work that feels like grinding when progress is invisible and it's so easy to keep making mistakes (with key accuracy or tempo) without realising.

The way it works is pretty simple. Plug a digital piano in over MIDI, or pair it over Bluetooth, and play. Scale Study listens, checks whether the run was clean, and stores your best tempo for that scale. Everything happens on device: no accounts, no ads, no uploads. When you come back the next day, or the next month, you can see what's solid and what still needs work. It uses iCloud to keep the progress in sync across devices.

It's very tempting to go the Duolingo route of streaks and gamification but I really want to focus on just making useful utility apps. So while you can see a streak based on calendar (and I may even make that clearer), I don't want that to be the focus.

C major is free so you can try the whole thing with one scale before committing. After that there's a small yearly price or a one-off lifetime unlock for the rest of the scales. It's an indie project so every penny goes to supporting me and the development of the app.

There's a little landing page over at scalestudy.app with a short video of it running, if you want to see what it looks like in use.