A deliberate practice app for guitar players who want to level up

It took me about 5 minutes to understand what this is doing.

For anyone else confused, it doesn't listen to you play, it just logs your use of the metronome and provides tabs.

IMO the app would be cooler if it was simply the metronome app on a page. And if you want to track which song you are working on, then just add the ability to label a session. Could have a different mode for people who want it over videos, but usually when I'm practicing, I know the tab and am not watching a video while I practice.

I never quite got the setup right, but Rocksmith seemed to live up to the promise of "guitar hero on a real guitar". It came out during a time when spending my free time tinkering with computers became much more important than tinkering with guitars.

Thanks for the feedback. I know the UI is not as intuitive as I'd like it to be for first time users. Multiple early users have told me that they expected it to either listen to them play or play back some audio. I am planning to record a small videos soon to clarify this.

> IMO the app would be cooler if it was simply the metronome app on a page. And if you want to track which song you are working on, then just add the ability to label a session. Could have a different mode for people who want it over videos, but usually when I'm practicing, I know the tab and am not watching a video while I practice.

The tab is mainly for (1) future reference, specially if you are creating your own exercises (2) sharing them with others. Sometimes I come up with short exercises myself that cover a specific technique or some picking pattern I am struggling with. Overtime I tend to forget those. In an earlier version, you could either add a tab or embed a video. But then I thought why not both! Feedback taken though, it should be fairly easy to make the tab/video section collapsible. Ability to label sessions in also on the roadmap.

I really wanted to like Rocksmith, but the progressive difficulty didn’t feel quite right. I would get stuck on new chords, try the recommended arcade games, get stuck on those even harder and less satisfying tasks, then lose motivation. By the time I picked it back up it didn’t respond to the fact that my skills had regressed and I had to start a new profile. I spent more time noodling in the tone modeler than anything.

I found the best way was to use the lessons and then the riff repeater on songs you want to learn, turn on all notes and slow down the speed until you can play a section. Then increase the speed or add a section.

In retrospect, playing Rocksmith mostly improved my timing. And made me "keep the song going even if you miss a note". If you're just playing alone, without a metronome, backing track or a band, it's a habit to stop and repeat bad section.

Recording and watching or listening to myself play has been very helpful for me. Even a temporary recording of just the current session, or most recent n minutes/beats would be nice. It's hard to evaluate execution in real time while performing it. To get it right as a user experience is not a simple task though. However, your great minimal feature set could also be seen as a plus to drive the practice routine efficiently no matter the quality, you'll get better too.

I went into Rocksmith because of this promise and for me it worked out well. Though it did not greatly improve my guitar playing skills beyond some of the basics, I do enjoy that I can interact in some way with the music that I like. It's like whistling along with your favourite song but with your hands, so the experience is much more engaging and it's feels more rewarding than guitar hero as the sound that I'm making sound a lot more like music than that clicking of buttons.

Nowadays they have a subscription service, I don't know what the quality of that is. But I mostly still play on the "2014 remastered" edition with a "real tone cable" on macOS, but I think they updated that and you can play with any "audio interface" device you like. There is also the customsforge library for unofficial songs, but quality varies.

Between Rocksmith and Youtube tutorials, playing along with my favourite songs is the most fun I can get out off playing guitar that my skill level and time investment allows. I'll never play in a band or make a decent sounding song, but enjoying and getting enveloped by music is good enough.

Nice yeah, a video would be great! Good work either way :D

Agree about recording and listening to it. I also do it sometimes. My concern about implementing the record/playback functionality is that it may introduce a bunch of complexity considering it's a web app (permissions to record mic, browser compatibility etc, limits on local storage etc.).

The dynamic difficulty indeed sucked bad. And it was multiple settings to disable it.