How to Keep a Music Practice Journal: Notebooks, Apps, and Templates

As an adult violin student, my goal is to continually improve while enjoying the process of learning and playing music. One helpful strategy I’ve found is keeping a music practice journal. Writing lesson notes, setting weekly goals, and reflecting on practice sessions makes my time with my violin more intentional, and makes the daily effort of practice more meaningful.

Journaling helps give structure and purpose to my practice sessions and helps me incorporate important feedback from my lessons throughout the week. I find that it helps with goal-setting, tracking progress, and seeing how far I’ve come during the years I have been taking lessons. Keeping a music practice journal has many benefits, whether you’re just starting out or have been playing for years.

In this guide, I’ll walk through multiple journaling formats that I’ve personally tried, from handwritten notebooks to guided journals and digital systems, and share some of my personal experiences with each format to help you to find a flexible system that helps you stay consistent, reflective, and motivated in your own practice.

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Free-Form Journaling and Bullet Journals

Handwritten Music Practice Journals

I’ve kept notebooks since childhood, and as an adult violin student, I often still turn to pen and paper to log my notes including lesson notes and practice logs. Handwritten journals offer a timeless, grounding daily ritual that digital tools can’t fully replace.

Benefits of a handwritten journal:

• A personal notebook becomes a record of your musical journey over time that you can always come back to reference. You can choose a style, size, or format that feels inspiring to you.
• Writing by hand encourages reflection and mindfulness.
• A blank page is flexible. You can easily add sketches of posture suggestions, draw diagrams, or notate exercises you want to remember along-side your written notes.

Bullet Journaling for Musicians

The Bullet Journal method, created by Ryder Carroll, is a flexible system built around “rapid logging” with short bullet points and symbols, lists, and collections. It blends planning and reflection in one place, with pages for tasks, notes, calendars, and habit trackers.

For musicians, it can be a powerful tool:

• Daily logs can capture short practice notes: repertoire, exercises, goals, and focus areas.
• Collections can hold repertoire lists, long-term technical goals, or performance notes.
• Weekly or monthly spreads make it easy to track practice time, habits, and progress visually.

I’ve found that jotting down a quick reflection about what worked, what didn’t, what I want to try or ask in my next lesson helps keep practice sessions focused on continual improvement as a violinist. Over time, a bullet journal becomes a planner and an archive, revealing how you evolve as a musician.

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Guided Music Practice Journals

Sometimes it helps to have the structure of a guided journal, especially if you haven’t kept a practice journal before. They provide prompts, reflection questions, and frameworks for goal-setting. They are especially useful for beginners, adult returners, or players who want to build better practice habits.

I’ve tried a couple guided journals. While most suffer from not offering enough writing space for full reflections, I found the prompts insightful and motivating.

Examples of guided Practice journals and apps:

• Practizma Journal (by Susanna Klein): A 16-week program with prompts for skill tracking and reflection. I used the digital version in GoodNotes, which let me add extra pages when I wanted more space to complete prompts and reflections.
• Purpose & Practice Journal (by Rachel Lee Hall): A six-month program combining daily reflection and goal-setting. I appreciated the structure but found the paper quality lacking and the space provided was often too little for deeper reflection.
• Muse & Mate Journal: A smaller format, well-designed journal with concise prompts for daily notes and motivation. This journal guides you through the goal-setting process, and offers structured ways to approach and to reflect on practice.
• Andante App (iOS): A digital practice journal with tools for logging practice, mood, and focus, that includes built-in features like a recorder, metronome, and timer. Some features are free, but others require a subscription.

Why guided journals can help:

• Built-in prompts make reflection easier.
• Structured programs help you experiment with new practice strategies.
• Goal-setting frameworks encourage steady progress.

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Digital Practice Journaling with Templates

If you prefer flexibility or already use a tablet or computer for notes, digital journaling may be a good fit. Digital journaling tools range from simple note-taking apps to more complex knowledge management systems. While there is a broad range of apps and platforms available, I’ll outline the ones that have worked for me which happen to be popular choices for keepers of digital journals.

Platforms Overview

• Obsidian: A Markdown-based notes app that features built in tools to create linked notes. This app is excellent for building a connected system of practice logs, lesson notes, repertoire lists, and performance reflections while maintaining the look and feel of a simple plain text notes app. It can start simple, but has the capability to scale into a full knowledge hub if you choose.
• Notion: This app is popular for its visual dashboards and linked databases. It is freat for tracking repertoire, habits, and goals in one place. You can build your own dashboards or adapt templates (many free and paid options exist).
• GoodNotes / Notability: These are some of the more popular digital notebook apps with a “paper-like” feel. They are great if you like handwriting with a stylus but prefer the convenience of digital storage. I used GoodNotes with the Practizma journal and appreciated being able to expand beyond the printed format and add my own extra pages for additional reflection and note-taking.

Benefits of Digital Journaling

• Highly customizable — build templates or dashboards to suit your goals, or source and adapt templates that others have already built to suit your needs.
• Easy to link between notes, repertoire lists, and goals.
• Media-friendly — you can embed recordings, images, or videos of your playing.
• Centralized — everything lives in one searchable hub.

Using Practice Journaling Templates

Templates make it easier to build consistent practice habits through journaling. A daily log might have sections for warm-ups, repertoire, and reflections. A weekly log might include prompts about what worked, what was challenging, and what you’ll focus on next. Linking these to a repertoire or goals note or database helps you see progress across weeks or months.

Digital templates for Notion that I recommend exploring:

• Instrument Practice Journal Template on Notion
• Music Practice Dashboard inspired by The Musician’s Way
• Piano Journal Template (adaptable for other instruments)
• Instrument Practice Planner on Etsy

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Closing Thoughts

Keeping a journal, whether handwritten, guided, or digital, is an effective way that I’ve found to bring focus and consistency into practicing. It helps me set goals, stay accountable, and see my growth as a musician.

I encourage you to experiment with different methods, especially if you have not yet tried keeping a practice journal. Try using a physical notebook, a guided journal, a digital dashboard, or explore how you might use the bullet journal method. Try different types of journals to see what feels natural and motivating, and adapt it as your playing evolves.