How to use it
Ten minutes from opening the page to a scored take. No account, no setup beyond a microphone.
1. Run the sound check first
Top right, the Sound check button. It takes thirty seconds: it listens to your room in silence, then to one held note, then optionally to your lowest and highest comfortable pitches.
Do this once. It matters more than it sounds — it sets the threshold that separates your voice from your room, so that a low score always means the singing rather than the setup. A laptop in a noisy kitchen and a headset in a quiet room need completely different gates.
2. Pick something far too easy
Start at the beginning of the NSM Method, even if you read well. The first unit is repeated notes and seconds, and it exists to calibrate you — to let you hear what the app calls “nailed” before you need that information under pressure.
3. Set the pulse
The brass dial on the left. Turn it, or tap it in time with your finger and it takes the tempo from your hand. Go slower than feels dignified. Sight singing is not a speed test; the tempo that teaches is the one where you can think ahead of your voice.
4. Put a drone under it
In the Listening panel: Drone on the tonic. Three voices — a tanpura on Sa and Pa, a choir, or bowed strings. Any of them gives your ear a key to sit in, which is the single most effective cure for drifting flat.
Use headphones. A drone through speakers is heard by your microphone, and a loud one can pull the scoring onto the tonic. The app ducks it while you sing, but headphones are the real answer.
5. Read before you sing
The three steps printed on the panel — Read, Breathe, Sing — are the actual method, not decoration. Before you press anything:
- Find the key signature and the first note's place in the scale.
- Scan for the hardest interval and the hardest bar, and hear those first.
- Feel one bar of the pulse in your body.
Then press Sing it. You get a bar of count-off, then the take.
6. Read the score properly
You get three numbers and a coloured stave. The numbers are pitch, rhythm and overall. The stave is where the information actually is: every notehead is coloured by its verdict, and carries a mark above it so the feedback is never colour-only.
- ✓ nailed — within a comfortable margin, steady.
- ∿ wavering — the right pitch, but it moved while you held it.
- ↓ or ↑ off — and the arrow says which way, so you know whether to brighten or relax.
- · missed — nothing was heard there at all.
Do not chase the overall number. Look for the pattern: if every leap upward is flat, that is one fixable habit, not eight separate mistakes.
7. Use the key wheel
The brass wheel transposes the exercise into any key and any mode. Drag it and it spins like a weighted dial; tap a letter and it goes straight there.
Two ways to use it. If a line sits badly in your voice, move it to where you can actually sing it — the reading skill is the same in any key. And if you want the opposite, turn on Stay in this key and the whole course follows you, so you are practicing your voice rather than your reading.
8. Two views worth knowing
Projector hides everything but the music and makes the stave large — for teaching a room, or for practicing without the interface looking back at you. Escape leaves it.
Canvas changes the paper: warm ivory, aged hymnal parchment, plain black-on-white like a printed part, or pale ink on slate for a dim room.
What to do next
Twenty minutes of this three times a week will move you further than two hours once. Sight singing rewards frequency over duration, because what you are building is a reflex.