A calm, observational practice tool — built honestly.
OuterPractice exists because the body teaches itself things while you play that you can't see while you're playing. A teacher in the room can see them. A teacher between lessons can't. This is what the tool is for — a second pair of eyes, not a coach.
Why this exists
Most of what makes practice better or worse is invisible to the person practising. Your shoulders creep up before a fast passage. Your jaw clenches when you read ahead. Your head drifts toward the score when the music gets dense. These are small things, and they accrue into a way of playing that's harder than it needs to be.
A teacher catches them in lessons. But between lessons — most of the actual hours of practising — nobody's watching. OuterPractice is that watching. It points moments out afterwards, calmly, the way a teacher would. It doesn't grade. It doesn't compare you to anyone. It just describes what the body did, and leaves you to make your own meaning of it.
The voice
Practice tools tend to shout. Streaks, scores, badges, "great job!" — the gamified register of a tool that needs you to come back tomorrow. OuterPractice doesn't have those, on purpose. A teacher in a one-on-one lesson doesn't say "you've earned the consistency badge." A teacher says "between minute 7 and 12 it was noticeably calm." Information, not a prize.
The full voice rules are in the repository if you want to read them. The short version: we locate the moment, describe what the body did, and stop. No judgement, no advice, no emojis, no exclamation marks.
The decisions
Privacy-first, literally.
Camera and microphone are read live and discarded — never recorded, never uploaded. Only small numerical features survive, and they survive in your browser. There is no server holding your data because there is no server. Full details in the privacy policy.
No accounts, no cloud sync.
Per-device, on purpose. The licence model is per-browser, honour-system: a key from us verifies cryptographically but isn't tied to an identity. We trust paying customers not to share keys; in return, the customer doesn't get tracked or locked into a device-management dashboard.
No analytics, no telemetry, no error reports.
We don't know how many people use OuterPractice, what features they use, or when something breaks. That's a deliberate trade-off: we sleep easier; we ship a little more slowly because we have to talk to users to know what's wrong. If something misbehaves for you, please write — that's the loop.
Built for teachers as much as musicians.
The "teacher between the lessons" framing is the seed, but the tool also belongs in the room with a student. Lesson mode (Teach licence) groups multi-clip lessons under one container, lets you write a reflection, and hands the student the whole lesson back as one file.
Who builds it
Built by Stefan van de Brug in Utrecht, the Netherlands. One-person operation — no investors, no team of designers, no growth hackers. The point of the tool is the tool, not the company. If it stays useful and pays for itself, that's enough.
If you've been using it and want to send feedback, or you teach and want to try Teach mode on a real student, or you want to write to me about something else — hi@outerpractice.app. I read every email.
If you want to go deeper
- Privacy policy — exactly what is processed, where it lives, what third parties are touched.
- Changelog — user-visible changes, most recent first.
- Setup & guide — first-session walkthrough, framing tips, what each modality is watching.