Modacity vs a BPM Tracker: Which Should You Use?

Modacity and a BPM tracker like Crank. sound similar — both are "practice apps" — but they answer different questions. Modacity is built around organising your practice and tracking the time you put in. A BPM tracker measures the output: whether a specific passage is faster this week than last. Which one you need depends on which question you're asking.

What Modacity is for

Modacity organises practice around your pieces: you build a list of what to work on, time your sessions, and keep notes and recordings attached to each item. If your problem is scattered, unstructured practice — you sit down, noodle, and can't say where the hour went — that structure genuinely helps. Its full feature set runs on a subscription (Modacity Pro was US$12.99/month at the time of writing).

What a BPM tracker is for

A BPM tracker skips the question of how long you practised and asks what the practice produced. You define a fragment — a lick, a fill, a hard four bars — set a target tempo, and log the clean max you earned each session. The output is a speed chart per fragment: proof the passage went from 96 to 120, independent of how many minutes it took.

Time in vs speed out

• Time tracking answers "did I show up and where did the hour go?" — an input metric.
• Speed tracking answers "can I play it faster than last week?" — an output metric.
• An hour logged can hide zero progress; a climbing BPM chart can't.

Neither metric is wrong. But if your goal is measurable technique — faster alternate picking, cleaner double kick, a passage finally at performance tempo — the input number can't tell you whether it's working. Only the tempo can.

How to choose (or combine them)

• Practice feels disorganised, goals are musical and broad — a practice organiser like Modacity fits.
• Goal is speed on specific passages — a BPM tracker gives you the number that matters.
• Doing serious technique work inside a bigger routine — they don't conflict; the BPM log covers the speed work.

Crank. takes the speed-tracking side and keeps it simple: fragments, targets, a built-in metronome, and a per-fragment clean-max chart — free on the App Store for iPhone, no subscription needed to start.