Show HN: Cadence – A Guitar Theory App

135•apizon•1w ago

Hello HN, I just released this music theory and ear training mobile app for guitar which I've been working on for a bit more than a year on the side.

The idea was to make something for the eternally "intermediate" guitarist (myself included). There are a lot of beginner apps which rely on learning songs, toolkits which give you a bunch of stuff with no explanation but not many in-between apps to actually learn and practice more generic and somewhat advanced stuff.

The app contains short lessons, recaps and most importantly challenges (visual, audio and pure theory) along with a very complete library.

The challenges are made for practicing, they will get increasingly harder and getting to the max score is supposed to be quite hard. The idea being that you have to repeat them regularly until your brain has integrated the info and it flows naturally rather than being a one time quick dopamine shot. This is partly inspired by how language learning apps work.

It has no ads, a lifetime purchase option and you can use it without an account if you don't care about multi-device sync or backing up your progress.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apizon.cad...

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cadence-guitar-theory/id674701...

(This is my second and last post about this sorry for spam. My first post a few weeks ago didn't get any views and posting on a saturday might not have helped...)

Comments

postepowanieadm•6h ago

Very nice! What's under the hood?

jealousgelatin•6h ago

Ui looks nice mate! I’d consider myself an eternally intermediate guitar player. Hit a level of competence and haven’t had the time/drive to move past it. Slightly unrelated, but I’ve always found the current ear training apps to not really translate to helping me pick out songs by ear.

I’ve always wanted an app that focuses more on learning songs by ear, finding the root not and chords/melodies, vs just isolated interval recognition. I’d love to improve at this while on the train which an app would be great for.

I’ve tried: Functional Ear, Earpeggio, and Perfect Ear. Functional ear is my favorite but I find it isn’t translating into my jam sessions.

epiccoleman•3h ago

My experience with ear training is that you really need to connect it to your instrument. If you're on the train where you can't play, obviously it can't hurt to train interval recognition and chord quality - but the ultimate point of training your ear is to build that connection between what you hear in your mind and what comes out of your fingers on the instrument.

If there's one "secret trick" exercise for guitar (and other instruments, I assume), it's singing as you play. Put on a loop and try to just sing the notes as you play them. Or scat a little lick and then try to replicate it on the guitar. It's really effective, it feels like it just "gets to the heart of the issue."

It works to boost interval training too - grab a root note somewhere, play, say, a minor third, get that sound into your head, and then sing it as you play it.

Transcription is also really helpful. Print out some blank tab, download Transcribe! so you can slow / loop sections, pick a song you like, grab your instrument, and just start trying to figure it out. It's grueling at first but it gets a lot easier with practice. As a side benefit, you get to steal licks from players you like.

For the most part, the great players are people who did a ton of this - whether it was rock guys listening to the same blues record over and over and learning the licks, or jazz guys doing obsessive transcriptions. Steve Vai famously found his way into Frank Zappa's band because he sent copies of his transcriptions to Zappa himself.

zozbot234•2h ago

The closest thing to a "secret trick" on guitar IMHO is to learn (1) the diatonic intervals(!), and (2) the fretboard, i.e. how these intervals happen to interact with the guitar tuning you're currently using. Start by singing ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (solmization) and find the notes on the fretboard as you do so.

(You may notice that we don't use ti or altered solfège syllables: that's because it's convenient to keep mi-fa as the only marker for a half-step and use an exceptional hexachord mutation whenever we need to reach other notes. (For example, the full major scale is sung ut, re, mi, fa, sol, re, mi, fa and descends fa, mi, re, sol, fa, mi, re, ut. Note how the half-steps are consistently mi-fa and fa-mi. Centering the system on that one feature agrees with the guitar's nature as a relative instrument; unlike on the keyboard, we need not think by reference to a single diatonic scale and its 'sharp' and 'flat' notes.)

The system also extends cleanly to other intervals; for example, the minor third is just re-fa or mi-sol, the major third is ut-mi or fa-la, etc. Very easy.

xcf_seetan•1h ago

The only "secret trick" to play guitar that I know is practice, practice, practice. Nothing beats everyday practice, even it is for 10 minutes. Not even telling what you can achieve with 4 hours daily practice. The continuous interaction with your instrument, will make you learn that when you hear a sequence of musical notes, your fingers would naturally went to the correct position on the neck to reproduce it, even without thinking.

tarentel•1h ago

I agree with the other person about singing. If you're any good at recognizing intervals already singing will really make it all click. Taking a few singing lessons would probably really help you even though it seems somewhat unrelated.

erdemo•6h ago

The interface looks very clean, I will definitely a go this one. Good job man!

oulipo2•6h ago

Looking great!

TrueTom•5h ago

Immediately begging for an account is reason enough for immediate deletion.

TomJansen•5h ago

I was actually happily surprised that you can continue without making an account

rideontime•4h ago

The duality of Toms.

criddell•5h ago

I’m trying this on my iPad.

My first bit of feedback is that the icons in the right column should be higher contrast. For me, they are difficult to see.

Also, I see the icons are eye, mortar board, and ear. What’s the fourth icon?

I’m solidly in the beginner camp (even though I’ve been trying to learn guitar for 35 years now), so maybe this isn’t for me. I’m going to kick the tires this weekend.

xcf_seetan•5h ago

The name is misleading. Initially i thought it was about creating new guitar designs. First time i heard "Guitar Theory", maybe OP was thinking about Music Theory, which, in itself, is a vast subject. It is more a harmony app, a.k.a. a Guitar Chord App. Other than that, it is a nice app to learn how to play individual chords.

blueboo•3h ago

These are fun to make. But the real value prop would be demonstrating the effect of following the proposed practice the app indicates.

…have you yourself actually tried it? Where was your technique and where is it now?

stn8188•3h ago

Thank you so much for sharing this! My kids all play instruments and I'm a bit jealous of their skill (I never played anything growing up). Over the last few weeks I've taken to borrowing my son's guitar at night and working through one of his books. I've been looking for more information on music theory, and this is so perfect. I'm excited to go through it. Thanks again!

sschmitt•3h ago

Pretty good! Translation by AI? First lessons quite well, but first quiz in German "Welche dieser Noten ist... ganze Tonoberhalb?" makes no sense.

edding4500•2h ago

Beautiful website :) will try it

distalx•2h ago

This looks great! I'm not a guitar enthusiast myself, but the design and color tone look very slick.

Congratulations on the launch after a year of work, and I wish you all the best with it!

Just out of curiosity, how much time did it take you to get app store approval from Apple and Google in 2025?

BrokenCogs•2h ago

I too am an eternally intermediate guitarist. Have you found this theory training to be helpful in some practical way? For example did this help you get better at improvisation?

dhruvmittal•2h ago

I like the look of this, especially the idea of mixing the visual with the auditory. My guitar teacher perpetually has me on sight singing apps to try to develop my ear, but having a more immediate connection between ear training and the fretboard could be really useful to me. I'll definitely give this a shot.

dprotaso•1h ago

Curious how you settled on your pricing?

jcjmcclean•40m ago

Just tried this out and I’m loving it, especially the UI/UX. The welcome screen animations are great, they make the onboarding feel smooth and polished. I love that the navigation icons show labels when active, so you always know where you are.

The built-in tutorial on the Learn screen is a really nice touch, and the Library is genuinely useful (I’ll definitely be using it for scales and arpeggios).

Also, the Go Premium page is clean and the pricing feels refreshingly fair. Awesome stuff!

Two quick questions too:

– What did you use to build it? The UI/UX feels super slick, it’s fast and smooth on Android.

– What were your biggest hurdles during the build? Not just technically, but overall. For example, was it tricky learning enough music theory to validate the content, or was getting it live on the app stores as a solo dev the harder part?

Rendello•27m ago

I might have to try it out. I got an interactive music theory course (Lightnote) built by another HN user after reading the "2024 side project show and tell" [1]. It seems to be in a similar vein, though with less emphasis on guitar. Maybe with both I could have theory and practice, so to speak.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42380418

rixed•40m ago

Thank you, this looks nice and useful, will definitively give it a try. For now, the only thing to report is that some screens are too long for my iphone7 and therefore I'm missing the end of a few sentences here and there. Would send screenshots if I knew how to reach you.

rixed•38m ago

Also, thank you so much for allowing an actual purchase!

babblingfish•22m ago

The design looks nice!

I think the pitch needs some work. If you're an intermediate guitarist, then memorizing chords and practicing absolute pitch won't make you better at playing guitar. Theory does not equal practice. Gamification apps like Duolingo can trick people into thinking they're making progress on a hard skill when they're really doing something tangential and easier.

Harmony guitarists don't construct their chord progressions using music theory. It's done iteratively with a guitar, maybe with a band, by playing the actual chords and seeing how it sounds.

kantbtrue•18m ago

I really like the language-learning inspiration here — music theory really is its own language, and repetition is what turns knowledge into instinct. Curious how you decided on the difficulty curve for the challenges. That’s always a tough balance to strike.

flessner•8m ago

I started learning the guitar years ago, but lost motivation once I got into university. Maybe I'll give it another shot and use this as a refresher on the theory!

Anyway, one small nitpick on the website: When on German language the word "FUNKTIONSHIGHLIGHTS" overflows on mobile. I would replace it with "WICHTIGSTE FUNKTIONEN" as that is two words.

Good luck, the website and App look nice!

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