Honk It Up!

Honk It Up! reads your band part and plays it back to you.

Open the PDF your director handed out, the one exported from the notation program, and the app reads the notes straight out of the file. Press play and hear how your part goes, at your tempo, with the valves for every note. Then hold a note, play it on your horn, and the app listens and tells you whether you hit it.

It was built for a high school marching band, for the student who is alone with a new chart and nobody to ask how it goes. For mellophone, French horn, trumpet and euphonium.

YOUR CHARTS Add the PDF of your own part from Files, iCloud Drive or OneDrive. The app reads the key, the notes, the rhythms and the rests, and keeps a copy on the phone so the chart opens on the bus with no signal. A bar it is not sure of is marked, so you know to trust the page there. A sample chart is included, so you can try all of this before your director sends anything.

HEAR IT, BAR BY BAR Play the whole chart or only the bars you keep missing. Slow it down to 40 beats a minute or take it up to 220. A count-in starts you off, and whole bars of rest are counted on screen, because alone in a practice room there is no band to count against. Every note shows the fingering for your instrument.

CHECK A NOTE Hold any note in the chart. You see it on the staff with its valves, you can hear it at the pitch your horn really makes, and when you play, the app listens. It tells you if you are flat or sharp. If you land on a different note with the same valves down, which is the miss every brass player makes, it names the note you hit and says which way to go.

The app knows these are transposing instruments. A written C sounds an F on a mellophone, a B flat on a trumpet and a B flat an octave lower on a euphonium, and it listens for the right one.

THE PRACTICE TOOLS - Trainer: any note on the staff, how it sounds and which valves play it, across the range you set. - A fingering chart for each instrument, worked out from the harmonic series and checked against published charts. - Scales, lip slurs and long tones, each explained in plain English, with the concert key and the written key both named. - A note recognition drill with score and streak. - A metronome that keeps going with the screen locked. - A practice timer and log.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account, no sign-up, no ads, no analytics. The app makes no network requests at all. The microphone is used only on the note check screen, and what it hears is measured and dropped: nothing is recorded and nothing leaves your phone.

ABOUT PDFS The app reads PDFs made by notation software such as MuseScore and Sibelius, which is what a director's exported part is. A scan or a photo of a page has no notes in it for the app to read, and the app says so plainly when it meets one.

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