How to Keep Track of Which Songs You Can Actually Play

At some point your YouTube "to learn" playlist crosses fifty videos and stops being useful. You open it looking for something to practice, and you can't remember which of these you've actually tried, which one you got halfway through, or which you saved eight months ago and never opened again. The playlist doesn't know either. It remembers the order you added them in — it has no column for whether you can play any of them.

One disclosure before I get into it, because it changes how you should read this: I make a guitar practice app, so I have an obvious interest in you organizing your songs a particular way. The three-state system I describe below isn't backed by a study. It's the data structure of my own app, and I'm writing about it here because it's what solved this problem for me, not because research produced it.

A playlist doesn't know whether you can play the song

YouTube does track something: if you've got watch history on, it puts a small progress bar under the thumbnail showing how far into the video you got (YouTube Help). What it doesn't have is a field for "I can play this," "I gave up on this," or "I haven't touched this in three months." That bar measures how much of the video you watched, not how much of the song you can play — a video you watched start to finish once, eight months ago, shows the same full bar as a song you can play cold today.

That's fine for ten videos. Past thirty or forty it stops working, because the list is now doing two jobs at once. It's your wish list, and it's supposed to be your record of progress. It was never built for the second one.

The real problem is that "can I play this" was never defined

Before you can sort songs by whether you can play them, you need a definition of "can play" that doesn't move depending on how the run went that day. Without one, the answer comes from mood. A clean run puts a song in "yes." A rough one, on the same song, twenty minutes later, puts it in "not really." It's a survey you're re-taking every time you play.

Here's the definition I use: start to finish, at something close to the real tempo, without the chart in front of you, twice in a row. The "twice" part matters more than it looks. A single clean take is often luck. The second one tells you whether it holds up.

Whatever definition you pick, write it down somewhere you'll actually see it, and don't change it because a run went badly.

Three states, not a pile

Once "can play" means something specific, every song you've saved falls into one of three buckets:

• Want to play — you found it, maybe learned the intro or a riff, haven't committed
• Practicing — you're actually working on it, some parts clean, some not
• Can play — meets whatever definition you settled on above

Keeping the three states honest

Once a month, sort your saved songs by "last practiced," oldest first. Two rules keep the list from drifting into fiction. A song marked "can play" that you haven't touched in two months gets played through once — if it doesn't clear your bar anymore, it moves back to "practicing." A song that's sat in "practicing" for three months without a session drops to "want to play."

Demoting a song isn't a failure. It's the upkeep that keeps the list worth opening.

A song isn't pass or fail

Even with the states above, a song can sit in "practicing" for months and feel like it's going nowhere. "Can play" is all-or-nothing, but most of a song usually isn't the problem. If you've got the intro, both verses, and the chorus down, and only the bridge keeps falling apart, marking the whole song "not yet" hides how close you actually are, and it hides where to spend the next session.

Split the song into its obvious sections — intro, verse, chorus, bridge, solo, whatever it actually has — and mark each one once it clears your "can play" bar on its own. "Practicing" turns from a vague feeling into a fraction: seven sections done out of nine, two to go. Those two tell you exactly what to pick the guitar up for tonight, instead of starting from the top and stalling on the same bar you stalled on last time.

Your own sense of "can I play this" drifts

Even with a clear definition, your read on your own playing while you're playing it is not reliable. You're watching your hands, listening for the next chord, and thinking about the bridge coming up, all at the same time. There isn't much attention left over to judge how it actually sounded.

The fix is cheap: record one full take on your phone, then listen back without the guitar in your hands. What you hear is usually not what you remember playing. A section that felt shaky is often fine, and the one you were sure was solid is where the tempo actually drifted. Do this before you promote a song to "can play," especially against a definition like "twice in a row." A recording is a much easier thing to judge than a memory of how the take felt in the moment.

The free version of all this

None of the above needs an app. Open a spreadsheet, or the notes app already on your phone, and make three columns: song, status, last practiced. Status is one of the three states above, typed in by hand. When you finish a practice session, update the row for whatever you worked on.

That's the whole system. Sorting or filtering by the status column gets you most of what a dedicated tool gives you automatically: a short list of what's actually in progress, instead of a fifty-item playlist where every video looks the same. If you want the part-by-part breakdown too, add a second sheet, or a note under each song's row listing which sections are done. It's slower to update than something that logs your practice time for you, but it costs nothing and it works.

If even a spreadsheet is more setup than you want, you can do a rougher version inside YouTube itself: make three playlists — Can Play, Practicing, Want to Play — and drag each video into whichever one fits. There's no "last practiced" date and no part breakdown, but before a practice session you only need to open one of the three: Practicing.

Try Fret Days

Fret Days is built around exactly the three states above, plus part tracking per song — the sections are already filled in when you add a song, and you rename them to match whatever the song actually has. The free plan covers 20 songs across all three states.

If you're deciding what to actually work on this week rather than how to file it, I've written about how many songs to keep in progress at once and about slowing a song down instead of stalling on a fast passage. Both feed into the "practicing" bucket this article is about organizing. And if the real issue is finding time to work through any of this, how long you should actually practice is the more useful place to start.

See how Fret Days works →

Written by the developer of Fret Days, a guitar practice-tracking app. This article doesn't cite research. It's built from my own experience organizing songs, not from a study, and I've said so wherever I'm describing a guess rather than something I've verified.

Published: 2026-08-07