When home vocal practice stalls, the problem is often not a lack of apps. It is the energy spent deciding what belongs on screen right now. The MusicalBoard home page is a workspace where tools can share one browser tab, but opening and sizing every window from scratch can turn five minutes of practice into five minutes of setup. The Practice layouts controls at the top of Home — in the right-hand tool shelf on wide screens and the icon row on narrow ones — open the right group of windows for Tone Check, Scale Practice, Range Today, or Record a Phrase in one action. They are not a wizard that forces a sequence; they are layouts that give you a useful starting point. If the tools are new to you, start with The Complete MusicalBoard Guide, then pair these layouts with the time blocks in A 20-Minute Vocal Practice Session.
Why presets help without taking away free layout
The idea that short, regular practice is easier to maintain than occasional long sessions also underpins the 20-minute dashboard routine. MusicalBoard does not lock you into steps such as “you must sing scales at minute seven,” though. Home remains a place where experienced users can open, close, move, and resize any window they want. A preset is simply a shortcut on top of that freedom.
When you choose a preset, its tool windows open at positions and sizes designed for a 1460×840px reference canvas on a wide screen. On a smaller monitor, you may need to scroll the workspace to reach every window, but the window sizes stay consistent with the wide layout. That makes today's preset feel close to the layout you used yesterday. Once you adjust a layout, the browser saves it in localStorage and gives that saved arrangement priority on your next visit. See the Privacy Policy for the storage scope and privacy details.
The four presets — what they open and when to use them
Each button opens a specific set of tools. You can still add or close windows from the sidebar or tool icons afterwards; a preset does not lock the workspace.
Tone Check — see pitch, tone, and level together
Tone Check places Vocal Pitch Monitor and Vocal Spectrum side by side. Use it during a warm-up to ask, “Can I trust today's graph?” It is also useful when you hold one vowel or a long tone and want to see both cent (¢) movement and where the sound energy sits in the frequency range. A pitch line can look roughly correct while the spectrum shows a signal that is too quiet or close to clipping; that can make later scale practice and recordings harder to interpret. The Voice Foundation includes warm-ups before voice use and avoiding misuse or overuse among its voice-health recommendations: Voice Disorder Prevention. What Is the Vocal Spectrum? and What Is Pitch in Music? explain what to read in each display.
A practical tip: if you plan to use Singing Recorder monitoring with headphones, see Hearing Your Own Voice While Recording. In the Tone Check layout, first set a sensible mic distance — roughly 15–20 cm — and level with Vocal Spectrum. The pitch trace is less likely to jump around during the scales and recording that follow.
Scale Practice — pitch and scales, without the metronome by default
Scale Practice opens Vocal Pitch Monitor and Vocal Scales in two side-by-side windows. The metronome is deliberately not part of this preset. If rhythm needs to be part of the work, add Online Metronome from its icon after applying the preset, or use the Record a Phrase setup instead. Choose a key, pattern, and repeat count in the scale tool, then watch whether the Vocal Pitch Monitor trace lands on each scale degree. That workflow follows the approach in A Singer's Guide to Scale Practice. The Vocal Scales detail page keeps pitch and scales on one page; Home deliberately separates them into a graph beside a scale panel.
For example, if yesterday's recording repeatedly fell flat around F4, first use Range Today to check whether your F area is yellow or red today. If it is comfortable, move to Scale Practice and repeat an F major or song-key natural minor pattern two or three times. You can work without a click or add the metronome when needed; the point is to focus on one note rather than turn the session into a long drill.
Range Today — today's range and reference notes
Range Today stacks Vocal Range Test above Virtual Piano. Use it to map how comfortable your voice is today while using the piano to hear semitone-by-semitone reference notes. It is a good choice before working on a song when you need evidence — the color map and session score — for whether to keep the original key or lower it by a semitone. What Is a Vocal Range Map? explains how to read that map.
One important detail: Vocal Pitch Monitor does not open automatically when you choose Range Today. On mobile, the earlier behavior that inserted Pitch at the top whenever you used scales or piano has also been removed. Pitch appears in the stack only when you select it from its icon. If today's goal is only to check range, leave it off.
Record a Phrase — click, reference note, and a short take
Record a Phrase opens Vocal Pitch Monitor, Virtual Piano, and Online Metronome. Pitch occupies the full left side, while piano and metronome stack on the right. Actual recording, uploads, and take playback happen in the Singing Recorder strip at the top of the screen; on narrow screens, open its panel with the controller button in the header. The preset is therefore a preparation view before recording, connected to the mic, monitoring, and take concepts in Recording Your Voice in the Browser.
When you want to keep just one short phrase — roughly 8–16 bars — check the starting note on Virtual Piano, set Online Metronome to about 60–70% of the song tempo (see How to Find the BPM of a Song), then record one or two takes in Singing Recorder. The pitch graph stays active while recording, so you can catch problems before you only notice them at playback.
Desktop and mobile — the same presets, arranged differently
On a wide screen, each tool opens as a movable, resizable window at its preset coordinates. On a narrow screen — roughly 1300px or below for the dashboard — the same open_order appears as cards stacked from top to bottom instead. The Fullscreen button removes site menu space and extra page chrome to enlarge the practice area; it does not start recording.
On mobile, Tone Check puts Pitch and Spectrum cards in the stack, while Range Today shows only Range and Piano. Pitch no longer appears at the top when you did not select it; the old behavior that forced Pitch into the stack for certain tools has been removed. The Open tools step in the Help (?) tour now explains that only tools selected from the icon row appear below.
The layout is still yours after choosing a preset
Moving or closing windows after choosing a preset saves that state. Choosing the same preset again arranges its tools again, so do not repeatedly press the preset if you want to preserve a carefully adjusted position from yesterday. Full reset is available by deleting mb-dashboard-window-layout-v1 in browser developer tools, although most users only need to know that the first-visit default opens Pitch and Scales.
Experienced users may prefer to choose each window themselves, as in the 20-minute routine. For everyone else, presets reduce setup decisions: decide only on the purpose of the day — Tone Check on Monday, Range Today on Wednesday, a phrase recording on Friday — and let the layout follow.
Common mistakes
Do not expect a preset to be a step-by-step tutorial with a “Next” button. In Record a Phrase, do not leave the mic off in Singing Recorder and assume that the metronome alone is recording. In Scale Practice, add an Online Metronome window if rhythm feels loose; it is intentionally absent from the preset. Finally, do not follow Range Today with a long, high scale drill when the map has a broad red area. Lower the key or shorten the phrase instead. A red area in the map is practice feedback, not a medical diagnosis; the U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) advises avoiding singing when the voice is hoarse or tired and seeking professional guidance for ongoing voice problems.
Practice with presets on MusicalBoard Home
Open MusicalBoard Home and allow microphone access. Choose one Practice layouts button for today's goal. With Tone Check, hold one comfortable note for 3–4 seconds and move your attention between Vocal Pitch Monitor and Vocal Spectrum. With Scale Practice, choose a key and pattern in Vocal Scales, then check whether the line follows the scale. With Range Today, scan in Vocal Range Test and use Virtual Piano to confirm reference notes around a difficult area. With Record a Phrase, set the tempo and starting note, then record only a short phrase in Singing Recorder.
Each tool has a dedicated page for deeper guidance: Vocal Pitch Monitor, Vocal Spectrum, Vocal Scales, Vocal Range Test, Virtual Piano, Online Metronome, and Singing Recorder. If the workspace layout is unfamiliar, the ? Help tour beside Fullscreen gives a quick introduction to the preset row, tool stack, and recorder.