The rest will help you play better and faster.

The cycle

One block, one break, repeat.

You set the practice length and start. When the block ends the app plays a two-note chime, the entire window cross-fades from cool mint to warm amber, and the break begins on its own — you don't have to remember to take it.

• 0:30–10:00 Practice. You choose the length; it defaults to 3:00.
• 3:00 Cool down. Fixed, automatic, and the same every time.
• 60s How long the break refuses to be skipped at all.

The evidence

Why the break earns its place.

In 2019 a team at the US National Institutes of Health had people learn a five-element finger-tapping sequence in alternating 10s bouts of practice and 10s of rest, under magnetoencephalography. Early learning was accounted for almost entirely by gains that appeared across the rests, not within the practice bouts — and brain activity during each rest predicted how much that particular break would give.

A later study on a digital piano found the effect is specific: players who practised a different sequence during their break gained significantly less across it. Resting means resting, not switching to another exercise.

• Bönstrup et al. (2019). A Rapid Form of Offline Consolidation in Skill Learning. Current Biology 29(8), 1346–1351. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2019.02.049
• Bönstrup et al. (2020). Modelling micro-offline gains. npj Science of Learning 5, 7. doi:10.1038/s41539-020-0066-9
• Simmons, Allen, Cash & Duke (2019). Effects of interleaved activity during rest. Psychology of Music 47(1), 83–95. doi:10.1177/0305735617735373
• Das et al. (2025). The counterpoint, included on purpose: argues these gains reflect fatigue recovery and pre-planning rather than true offline consolidation. PNAS. doi:10.1073/pnas.2509233122

Cool down

A break you can't talk yourself out of.

Every practice tool lets you skip the rest. That is the one thing this one won't do, and it is deliberate — the break is not idle time between the useful parts, it is one of the useful parts.

So during the cooldown the skip button stays locked for the first 60 seconds, reset does nothing at all, and the length slider is disabled until the break is over. There is no setting to turn any of that off, and requests to add one get politely declined.

Put the guitar down. That is the whole feature.

Get it

Download

One file. Nothing to install, no runtime to fetch first.

Android and iOS builds share the same timer core and are in progress.

Verify

Is this safe?

Short answer: yes — and you don't have to take my word for it. Every claim below is something you can check for yourself in a couple of minutes.

• The source is public All of it, and there isn't much — the whole timer is a few hundred lines. You can read it in an afternoon.
• The builds are public too Every release is compiled by GitHub, not on my machine, and carries a signed attestation tying that exact file to the exact source it came from. Anyone can check it:

  gh attestation verify GuitarPracticeTimer-*-win-x64.zip \
    --repo Baracuda011/GuitarPracticeTimer

• Fingerprints Each release ships SHA256SUMS.txt, so you can confirm the file you downloaded is byte-for-byte the file that was published.
• It cannot phone home The app contains no networking code of any kind — no account, no analytics, no update check. That is not a promise about what it does with your data; there is simply no code that could send any.
• On first run Windows may ask you to confirm before opening a program it hasn't seen many people run yet — choose More info, then Run anyway. That prompt reflects how widely a program has been downloaded so far, not anything found inside it.

Support

If it earned a coffee.

The app is free and stays free. There is no paid tier planned, nothing is held back, and it will never ask you for anything inside the app itself.

If this little tool helps you practise better, you can support its development with any amount you like. No obligation — just keep practising.