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why this exists

About Minuet

People put an instrument down when it stops feeling like it's working. Most of the time it was working. Nobody was keeping the record.

The problem is that you can't hear it

Getting better at an instrument happens slower than a person can perceive. A day of practice moves you a distance too small to notice, so day after day the honest report from your own ears is this sounds like it did yesterday. Do that for two months and quitting starts to look like a reasonable conclusion from the evidence.

It isn't. The evidence is just missing. Six weeks of small changes is an obvious difference — you simply never get to hear the two ends next to each other.

So Minuet keeps the record

Every session writes down what you played, how long you stayed and the tempo you finished at. Enough sessions and it draws a line, and the line does the thing your ears can't: it shows a month of work as one shape.

Recordings do the other half. Your hands take most of your attention while you're playing, so you don't really hear yourself in the moment. A take from March, played next to a take from April, is not an opinion about whether you're improving. It's a recording.

What it isn't

• Not a teacher. It doesn't mark you, score you or tell you what to work on. It writes down what happened and leaves the reading of it to you and whoever teaches you.
• Not a streak machine. No leaderboards, no badges, no guilt for a week off. A practice diary with a mood is a practice diary you stop opening.
• Not a place your playing goes. Nothing is uploaded, because there's nowhere to upload it to. A diary nobody else can read is the only kind worth keeping.

Why it looks the way it does

The app underneath never changes, but you can dress it — warm wood and brass, a night sky over water, a practice room in Paris. That isn't decoration for its own sake. Practice is a habit, habits need somewhere you want to sit down, and the thing that gets a fourteen-year-old to open the app on a Tuesday is allowed to be that it looks good.

Who makes it

Minuet is made and published by Mishmapps LLC. It's small, and mail sent to it is read by a person who works on the app.

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