I'm Daniel. I've been playing the piano for sixteen years.
In high school I practiced two to three hours a day, pushing through advanced, incredibly demanding repertoire. Then came six years of university, mathematics and computer science, and the piano mostly waited.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about those sixteen years: at any given time, I can keep roughly three pieces alive. Not one of them from start to finish. When I learn something new, something old quietly slips away. When I leave a piece for three weeks, my fingers no longer know where to go.
Most pianists quietly conclude that this is a personal failing: not enough talent, not enough discipline. It isn't. Pieces decay unless you revisit them, and replaying everything you know often enough to keep it all alive stops fitting into a daily practice hour very quickly. Something old dies whenever something new comes in. It's a scheduling problem, and almost nobody practices with a schedule.
I recognized the pattern, because I had already solved the same problem twice outside music. Testing myself instead of re-reading, and reviewing each thing right before I'd forget it, carried me through my degrees. Later I built myself a spaced-repetition app for Japanese and used it to reach JLPT N1, the highest level of the official proficiency test. This method is not a study trick. It is one of the most reliably replicated findings in memory research.
And I had noticed, years earlier, that the piano obeys the same rules: pieces stick fastest when I force myself to play from memory instead of reading the score again. What was missing was the machinery. No teacher can track hundreds of bars across your whole repertoire and know which ones you're about to lose. Software can. A digital piano reports every note you play over MIDI, so the grading can be honest and the schedule can be automatic.
That is Clef: real sheet music on screen, every note checked as you play it, and each bar re-tested from memory right before you'd forget it.
I'm building Clef alone, in Germany, and I practice with it every day. When you write to [email protected], I'm the one who answers.
If you have ever finished a piece, set it down, and come back a month later to find it gone: that is the problem Clef exists to solve.
— Daniel Dratschuk
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