Your skills and progress

The skills wheel: what you’ve built, what’s fading, where your week went, and how to refresh a skill.

Your skills on the dashboard

The Your skills card on the dashboard shows a small version of your skills wheel. Tap the card to open the full Your skills screen.

On Your skills, the read-out with a clock is everything you have practiced in total. It only ever grows, so a week away costs nothing.

The six skills

KeyFu tracks six skills: Timing (staying with the beat, not just near it), Chord moves (the changes a song is built on), Ear (recognizing what you hear before you find it), Chord shapes (getting the shape under your fingers), Hand sync (both hands landing together) and Low notes (the low part a song stands on, usually played by your left hand).

Reading the wheel

Each skill has its own segment of the wheel, always in the same place. The list has one row per skill; the small wheel icon that starts each row shows which segment is that skill.

A segment fills as the skill grows. An empty segment with a thin outline, and an outlined icon, is a skill KeyFu hasn’t measured yet. It is not a score: its row says which exercise fills it in. Before anything is measured, each segment is a single outline. explains what each reading means. Every part of this screen is free.

Level

Level shows how far along each skill is, in words rather than numbers: Just getting started, Finding it, Coming along, Solid, Strong and Second nature.

For a skill the app has only just started measuring, it says Getting to know this one; a couple more sessions and it settles. Tap a segment of the wheel, or a skill’s row, to open that skill.

Freshness

Freshness shows how well a skill is holding since you last practiced it. It has three states: Still fresh, Fading and A trace, with a count of days since you last practiced it. It is not a day-by-day timer.

When a skill has slipped, the coach says so and Practice buttons appear for it. Each opens that skill’s card, where you can start a short refresh.

Balance

This week shows where your practice time went, in minutes per skill. The bar compares each skill with the one you practiced most this week; it isn’t a fixed scale.

If you have a goal, the coach says whether most of the week went to the skills your goal leans on, and may add which skill is leading and which one is your next win.

Your goal on the wheel

When you have a goal, the skills it leans on get an outlined ring on the wheel and a small goal tag by their names in the list. Pick a ready-made goal and the rings appear from your first session; a goal in only your own words gets them once the coach has read it.

The ring only marks the goal. It is never part of the fill, so changing your goal moves the rings but never takes away progress.

A skill’s card

Tap a skill’s row, or its segment of the wheel, to open its card. It says what the skill is, how KeyFu measures it, and where you stand: the level word, how fresh it is, and when you last practiced it. Once you own harder versions of the exercises behind it, Stages you own lists them, in the same words as an exercise’s page.

On iPhone, swipe the card down to close it; on iPad, use .

Start a short refresh

Start a short refresh plays one exercise for that skill, the easiest one that suits you right now, and starts as soon as you tap.

If it can’t start, the card says why: the exercise needs more keys than your keyboard has, you have done a lot today and it can wait until after a break, or the drills it builds on come first. The button is dimmed for a skill that hasn’t been measured yet.

Before anything is measured

Before you have played, the coach says it hasn’t heard you yet and that any exercise is a good start. Start anywhere opens the exercise library, where a few minutes of anything you like the sound of puts your first segment on the wheel.

Every skill except Ear needs a real keyboard to be measured, because tapping the screen can’t tell how you press.