The Guitar Practice Routine App (GPRA) is a web app for organizing and tracking guitar practice routines. It's intended for beginners and intermediate players (but if you're an advanced player or a pro, you're welcome here too if you find it useful.)
You can create practice items, organize them into routines, use timers to stay focused, create chord charts, and have chord charts autocreated for you, among other things.
Just some guy. I'm Steven Shults. I'm an amateur/hobbyist guitar player, a tech support professional, and I was a theatre artist for 25 years (before I had kids. Hoping to get back to it after I retire someday.)
This app is not my livelihood, it's just a hobby. I have a "day job."
GPRA was initially inspired by the My Practice Assistant on JustinGuitar.com. I'd tried several tools for tracking practice stuff, and Justin's was the best I'd found (Btw: Justin's free and paid courses are fantastic. If you're looking for an online course, I highly recommend JustinGuitar.com!)
But the practice assistant on Justin's site was just too much of a pain and a timesink to use (e.g., you can't drag and drop to change the order of items in a routine. Oof. I'm not sure he remembers it's there, it's no longer on the Tools menu of his site, or listed in his FAQ index. So I'm very much hoping he won't be bothered that I used it as an inspiration for GPRA!)
So, I built* my own tool based on Justin's, and ran a tiny local server on my own computer during my practice time. Over the course of a year or so, I gradually improved it further, and added additional features for myself.
A few months ago I took a step back, looked at it with fresh eyes, then thought: "Hey, this doesn't suck. Maybe other people would want to use it, too."
But due to the costs of putting it online, I can't afford to give it away, I need to at least cover the costs of the hosting and the AI stuff. So in my spare time, over a few months, I built an account system for multiple users, added Stripe for subscription handling, and all the other stuff that makes a web app a web app.
*By "built", I really mean I vibe-coded it with Claude. I can write code, just not fast, or well. But, I know what good UI/UX is, and I understand apps and code well enough to use AI to build something that can actually be used. So, with Claude's help, I made it happen in about 1/8th of the time it would have taken me to code it all keystroke-by-keystroke myself.
Note: I have lots of concerns about AI, especially when it comes to art of any kind, but I think there are good uses for AI, and code is one of them. Claude has become pretty damn good at it.
Running a web app costs money; hosting, databases, AI API calls, and time (even vibe-coding takes some time, then there's testing, maintenance to keep various libraries up to date and secure, improving things based on feedback, etc.) The subscription model lets me pay those bills to keep the app running (the free tier is ad-supported, but the trickle of ad revenue is unlikely to pay for the costs incurred by free users.) I doubt I'll ever make an actual profit, but it'll be a nice surprise if I do.
Found a bug? Have a feature request? Want to submit a PR? Just want to say hi?
Reach out
