Review of “Guitar Practiced Perfectly” Software

Overall

Guitar Practiced Perfectly is a piece of software that helps a guitarist manage and plan practice routines. It includes 300 or so practice routines out of the box. Routines can be organized into sessions. Sessions can be organized arbitrarily, but the software supports daily sessions. It’s written in Adobe Air so it will run on Mac and PC. I’m running on Windows 8 64-bit.

I’ve only used the software for one practice session so far. The overall effort is very good. As far as I know, it’s the only software of its kind. At $50 US, it’s a little pricey to buy without a trial.

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Missing Features

  • I should be able to create my own routines. This is a huge gap in the software. For example, I’d like a version of the C major pentatonic that includes the minor 3rd and the diminished 7th. Or I’d like a routine in which I play a scale through ascending keys.
  • When I drag/drop an element between tree elements, I should be able to choose "Copy" or "Move."
  • In addition to being able to create a new routine, I’d like to be able to clone an existing routine and modify it.

Bugs

  • I’ve noticed that if I’m playing an exercise and change the tempo then it stops playing sound. I have to close/reopen the software to get it to play sound again.
  • Drag/Drop a routine within a session doesn’t work. This makes changing the order of the routines hard.

Usability Problems

  • The use of accordion style controls for the session menus makes it hard to understand that you can drag/drop exercises between accordion tabs. In general, accordions should not be used when data is shared across panels.
  • The fact that the screen elements are static is irritating. It would be nicer if I could move things around. The best UI I’ve seen for this sort of thing is in Microsoft Visual Studio. Each panel is draggable and dockable on its own. I don’t know if Adobe Air gives you this kind of flexibility, but it would be nice, and it would make the drag/drop operations easier to manage as "Session by Weekday" could be docked to a different screen area than "Session by Skill Level."
  • The user should be able to drag/drop more than one exercise at a time. I found this annoying when I was trying to drag all of a certain category of exercise to my Sunday routine. I had to do them one at a time.
  • The labels that control Tempo, Lead In, Repeat, etc react to the mouse as if they were buttons. Clicking them doesn’t do anything. This is confusing. They should either just be labels, or open some kind of advanced editing screen.
  • Having to choose between Music and Metronome is painful. They should have independent volume controls.The existing either-or functionality forces me to into a tricky volume balancing act with my amp.
  • Help->About menu should include the software version. The fact that the software version is missing from the UI makes it hard to tell if you are running the latest.
  • The main window should include a standard control box for changing screen size, minimize, and maximize functionality.
  • I think it should be impossible to delete system-defined routines and sessions. This is scary functionality as I could get rid of something very useful.

Overall

I like Guitar Practiced Perfectly very much and I’ll get a lot of use out of it. However, it’s not the software I was hoping it was. The lack of routine-creation and editing functionality means it misses the mark by quite a large margin. Some of the UI constraints make working with sessions very hard. For an intermediate player such as myself, it will definitely help me take my playing to the next level. However, I’ll not be able to use it to integrate my teacher’s lessons into my daily practice.

Final Score

70%

8 thoughts on “Review of “Guitar Practiced Perfectly” Software

  1. The content of GPP is designed specifically to be fixed, as it would soon become confusing to users, especially beginners, if we allowed additional notes to be added to scale shapes. MIDI playback is there to let the user hear the notes on first use, however it would be expected that MIDI is soon turned off and the metronome is used for daily practice. The import function is designed to allow a player to take any sheet of music, song, magazine page, guitar pro tab, or user modified scale, and import as a scanned jpeg file. This allows great flexibility for any ability and these “user custom routines” can be used in any practice session. Although these are static pages the metronome settings are stored and they can be dropped multiple daily sessions so you don’t forget to play them.

    We recommend the backup function is used to protect against losing or deleting any of your custom settings or content. This is a BIG time saver if you lose your hard drive for any reason. And if you delete something by accident just select backup and pick up the saved file. Its quick and easy.

  2. I tried it and asked for my money back – full of bugs, practically impossible to import my own material despite claims made for this functionality, and building routines didn’t as drag and drop seemed unable to drop things where I put them. The idea of this software is very good but the execution is so poor I think they’re selling before enough work has been done to make it usable.

  3. I’m pleased to say we have just released a new version of our PC software. The Mac version will follow shortly.
    We have addressed the issues with bugs and made several enhancements. Here is a list of the main updates:

    Metronome BPM can be adjusted whilst routine in in play
    Play controls made more stable
    Updated fret board for visually improved design
    Fret board is turned off for static routines to provide more screen space to display content
    Changed some naming convention to avoid confusion
    Turn off annoying reminder dialog boxes
    Current version number displayed in help/about
    Copy & paste function for copying content to weekday or user sessions
    Add routines directly into highlighted folder tree location
    Fix installation issues on some operating systems

    Check out the latest version and I’m sure you will be pleased!

    Thanks
    Guitar Practiced Perfectly

  4. I’ve just read your email message about the new version and I have to tell you that it made me laugh out loud. You really need to get someone to proof read your comms before you send them out guys. Errors make you look daft and really doesn’t inspire confidence in your product.

    1. the new version is awesome GPP, as was the old. Ok it was a bit buggy but who cares, it got the job done. ^^^ this guy talks about proof reading an email? well done Rascalito, you are the typical guy who looks for mistakes and misses out on a great product. you make me LOL as you make yourself look daft being so petty

  5. Guitar Pro is 300x better, cheaper, and you can freaking make your own tabs, play your own tabs, download other tabs to play on it! This program is a joke, it’s just a copy off Guitar Pro and they can’t get all or more features of it.

    1. Ignore the idiot above, he’s obviously got an agenda. If you can’t understand the difference between guitar pro and guitar practiced perfectly then perhaps you need to consider the tambourine LOL

      I’m loving it

  6. thanks for the upgrade, its good to get some bits really sorted. gpp now does what it says on the tin. good work guys and i look forward to more!

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