Show HN: Cadence – A guitar theory app

Very nice! What's under the hood?

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.

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

Looking great!

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

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

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.

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.

The duality of Toms.

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?

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!

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

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.

Beautiful website :) will try it

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.

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?

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?

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.

Curious how you settled on your pricing?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

Interesting. I was a fairly serious amateur guitarist in a former life, and the physical skill was the hard part. Playing a Bach lute suite, or something like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQXvMWojs28), takes an incredible amount of strength and precision. With 1-2 hours per day of practice, learning that kind of material took weeks or months.

If you imagined the sound of tom - tom - ride on drums, its a nice punchline to your joke :)

Agreed, and I slightly hesitated to use that phrase, but I do think the "sing and play" exercise is a uniquely good thing to practice, practice, practice. It just seems to really work to connect the part of your brain that comes up with melodies to the part of your brain that runs the fingers. YMMV, of course.

I think we're largely advocating for the same thing, though your method is more formalized.

Either way, my bigger point is: connect "ear training" to your practice on the instrument, and don't neglect the speaking portion of learning the language in favor of the hearing.

Thanks for the feedback and I hope the app will be useful to you!

This is the app I was begging for a few years ago!

Ended up buying a ton of Ear Training books and using those little web apps.

This would have been so much better.

I just started using it,

I will say, I feel we can skip the chords annotations and stuff if the ICP is intermediate guitarist.

Or do a quick survey at the start and see what fundamentals they know.

For intermediate guitar, I think the main gaps are:

- Ear training (unless they were taught early) - triads + inversions - Music theory beyond basic pentatonic shapes - Synchronization at higher speeds (this was my biggest one by far) - Chords beyond basic ones and M/m 7th.

I feel you could add little quiz or survery to see if they are already familiar with some of these.

just my 2 cents

Overall, love this. Very happy someone took the time to do it.

Thanks for the feedback!

I can't argue the fact that playing the guitar will always be the best way to improve. The app come as a complement and is especially meant to help memorize shapes and more importantly recognize how different chord types, intervals or scales are related. Although it probably won't improve playing feel or technique directly I hope it can give a kind of "lightbulb" moment to some people in the way they view the fretboard.

As for the ear training part, the app actually focuses on relative pitch which is a very useful skill to have and one you can actually learn as an adult unlike absolute pitch. E.g. recognizing a major 7 sound from a minor 7 one, not a Cmaj7 from a Dmaj7.

Thanks for the detailed feedback :)

When I first started working on the app I actually mostly meant to go only with a quiz + flashcards approach with little to no explanation but this felt a bit rough and I was affraid most users would just give up on it too quickly. Also I think some users might have learned guitar theory a different way and might not be too familiar with diagrams, such as classical guitarists.

Hence why I added all these lessons with more details including beginner ones.

I might add something in the vein of a "practice page" with only challenges and the ability to create custom ones in the future for more advanced users + a change to a more interactive onboarding that actually asks what you want rather than showcase the app, we'll see...

I love your pricing model, enough to make me download the app.

Free with limited lessons. $3 a month for more, or $30 for lifetime.

It makes folks like me who have subscription-itus smile.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot

The app is made with flutter with mostly just the default widgets that I customized a bit. I'm not really that versed into UI/UX so I just tried to keep things simple design wise. As for performance, I didn't even have to do that much optimization except for the library part to have smooth scrolling when displaying hundreds of diagrams but overall the framework is pretty fast and a joy to work with.

I'd say the hardest part honestly was just staying consistent for more than a year alone without really any feedback and just sticking to it a little every evening and on the week-end rather than playing a game or something. Especially making the content itself was at time a bit repetitive like the lessons or the chords for the library (which were all manually taken from books not auto generated)

I started the app store process quite some time before release so it's just something I did a little here and there in between commits and overall it wasn't that painful.

All but english and french (my native language) are machine generated yes sorry about that but there is quite a bit of text with all the lessons so I can't afford man made translations at my scale.

Maybe I will find a middle ground and get translators just for the critical parts such as the challenges, or at least find a better way to translate parameterized strings like the one you are referring to.

EDIT: there is indeed an issue with some localized entries where the parameters are not placed properly, I will fix this for the next version

As the "other Tom" has said you can use the app without an account there is just a warning message telling you that if you do your progress is not backed up online.

I actually shipped without this message at first and realized by talking to non technical family and friends that some people might not realize the implications and didn't want someone ending up in my support email 1 year after buying the app telling me they had lost all their data.

Thanks, I too have subscription-itus hence the lifetime option.

The subscription is mostly here for people who aren't sure and because you can't offer free trials on lifetime purchases

Thanks, not being well versed in design I just picked a small color palette I liked and sticked to it

Approval was I think 2-3 days for Google (I had already validated the store page and opened it to preregistration a month before the final build) and a bit more than week for App Store due to some back and forth because of missing privacy policy links in some places of the app and stuff like that.

Thanks for the feedback

Have you tried the light mode? I find it has better contrast than dark one but I might need to add an accessibility setting too

The fourth icon is a head with a gear inside, it represents your progress on the pure theory challenge

You can still have a look, the beginner lessons are free. But when starting out I think just learning to play your favorite songs is probably the best way to improve at first

Thanks :) hope you'll like it!

Thanks for the feedback

I'm not sure if it's allowed to post an email here so I'll refer you to the app itself: there is a "Support and contact" button on the settings page.

I'm definitely interested in seeing those screenshots if you can as text is supposed to wrap around nicely

3$ a month or 30$ forever.

It's actually seems pretty fair, a decent guitar is going to run you a good sum of money, and if this can actually take me from knowing nothing to being competent, you can have my money.

Thanks for the feedback

Not sure how those app works but as others have said apps alone will probably not be enough to entirely translate to the instrument and actually practicing picking up songs or transcribing them will be needed.

I can also recommend the great Sonofield Ear Trainer app by Max Konyi for intervals and melody recognition (no relations to him at all but I took some inspiration for the interval recognition part so just want to credit him). He also has a youtube channel and actually released a video called "From Ear Training Apps to Real Music" 2 days ago which might be of interest to you.

As for my app I think it does pretty good at training chord recognition. I also plan on adding lessons on chord progressions at some point in the future so there will be challenges associated to it, I think recognizing progressions is probably the most useful when trying to pick up songs by ear.

this looks super nice! ive been meaning to learn guitar a bit, and im wondering is this app also suitable for complete beginners?

I don't think the app alone will directly make you better at improvisation as this comes only from playing imo but it might make you better at practicing improvisation.

Personally I find when practicing alone I often get stuck on playing the same phrases and chords.

The app can help visualizing and thinking of new shapes or places to play that maybe I wouldn't have though of naturally. This brings some most welcomed novelty to my playing until I get bored with it again.

Rince and repeat ad vitam æternam as I don't think one can ever reach a eternal state of contentment with one's playing. Or in other words, there is no leaving intermediate guitaristry I guess but that's okay (:

Thanks, I'm not gonna lie it's probably not the best or at least should not be your only resource.

It can be pretty useful if you're someone that likes understanding how things work but for pure playing skills learning to play songs you like using a chord or tabs book/app/website or a better a teacher will probably get you started much quicker and you can learn the theory at any point later when you feel like it

Beginner lessons are free though so you can still check it out

Thanks ! Flutter for front-end and PocketBase on a €5/month VPS for the backend (which is not even breaking a sweat despite the blow up of this post so really happy with that) + RevenueCat for purchase handling and Sentry for error reporting

Thanks :)

No clear methodology, I just tried for every lesson to bring the topic to its bare minimum for the easy difficulty, then add one layer for normal and one more for hard when possible, if not just adding more possible answers which is not ideal but some topics really are too specific to make variants.

As for the "progressive" difficulty mode, it just goes over the 3 levels so it's more of difficulty plateaus than a curve per say

Thanks, good ol' wordpress still does the job

> I'd say the hardest part honestly was just staying consistent for more than a year alone without really any feedback and just sticking to it a little every evening and on the week-end rather than playing a game or something.

I'm in the same boat right now. Good on you for releasing!

> [from the post] the eternally "intermediate" guitarist (myself included).

So, how are your guitar skills now?

Good luck with your endeavours!

Not too great, my practice time has been severely impacted by the making of this app ironically

The intented meaning was more something like "Music theory applied for guitar" indeed but I can see the confusion

Gut feeling I suppose ? Pricing less felt like selling it short considering I still have quite a few features and content I want to add to the app, pricing more felt too much considering it's missing aforementioned features (:

I might bump the price to $50 in a year or so if I'm satisfied with the new content/features and feel like it deserves it (only for new users, lifetime owner will get all updates for free obviously).

If I quickly play two different notes there is a pop/crack noise. It doesn’t do this during any of the automatic sequences (likely, because it waits for the sample to stop before playing the next). (iOS)

When I went back to see if I could reproduce this outside of the Audio Challenge recap, the audio was broken. All sounds were choppy and delayed. Restarting the app the first time didn’t fix it, but switching back to the classical guitar and restarting did. I can’t seem to reproduce it now (other than the manual pop/crack).

Funny I've always found the technicality of the guitar to be the easier part on the contrary.

Don't get me wrong, playing a piece like this cleanly and with such feel takes great skill and is probably not something I will ever be able to do but I mean easy in the sense that you can quite clearly see the path to take to get there (or halfway there). "Just" learn the piece slowly block by block, then repeat it for hundreds of hours without much thinking until it flows by itself (I'm simplifying but you get my point).

On the other hand, while theory can be grasped quite fast, applying it to your playing, composing, and improvising with it has always felt to me like a multifaceted beast that you have absolutely no idea at which angle to tackle from. You just stumble your way around it until the pieces start clicking together and it's really hard to find a clear path to follow which makes it much harder imo, or at least more frustrating/blurry.

Thanks !

If by proposed practice you mean the tidy bits of guidelines at the end of some lessons, those are mostly just general tips for beginners more than a clear plan to follow.

I believe the value of the app is in learning how all those musical block work and interact together, how to recognize them by ear and visualize them on the neck so you can incorporate them in your playing rather than an app to learn the technicality of the guitar.

As for my own playing, as stated in another comment it has quite suffered from my lack of practice due to the time spent on making this...

Thanks :)

So this is a weird request, but if you can, would there be any way to get this as a website.

I would love to practice in front of my TV, which is pretty easy once I plug my laptop into my television. It's doable on Android, but it's not really an ideal use case

Hopefully you can reap the benefits of the sowing, both monetarily and skill-wise!

Thank you for the feedback

There is supposed to be a short transition window when playing a new sound to prevent the popping issue. Is it on the "Note names" lesson recap? Also if you don't mind sharing your version of iPhone/iPad, I'm concerned some older devices might have performance issues since the audio is synthesized in real time, maybe increasing the window could help.

As for the audio being completely broken and needing an app restart it actually happened to me a couple times during development but I was never able to understand how or why it occured and haven't seen it again since months so no fix in sight...

Thanks. As a beginner guitarist just starting to get into ear-training, that all sounds like good advice. However, I’m curious as to what you mean by “Put on a loop”?

I also looked up Transcribe! and see that they have a Linux installer (32-bit in addition to the 64-bit!) so I must try it out: https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/download.html

iPhone 17 Pro Max (iOS 26.0.1)

I have reproduced the pops everywhere I am able to manually trigger notes.

I was fiddling with the guitar tones, then opened from the background when the audio broke. I tried repeating that, but no repro.

Technically the framework I'm using (flutter) is cross platform so I guess it could be possible but I'm affraid a few of the libs I use such as the ones for the audio are not and either way it would still need some adaptation to work well.

Not entirely impossible that I do it in the future but clearly not at the top of my list for the moment sorry!

Ya Flutter !

Are the accounts cross platform. Can I buy it on Android and use it on iOS

Thanks, I hope you will like it!

By "put on a loop" I mean "play a sequence of known chords in a loop" - so that you can practice playing and singing notes in context (i.e. in context of a song, jam, etc).

There are tons of backing tracks available on YouTube, but a loop pedal is more versatile, allowing you to play arbitrary chord progressions and workshop them.

Transcribe! is a seriously great piece of software, it's got everything you need to get started with transcription. Another great way is to just get in the habit of tabbing out little melodies that get stuck in your head. (Yes, it's fine to start transcribing in tablature, reading standard music notation is a great skill but not necessary to get started.)

hubguitar.com has a little tool for building printable blank tab sheets which I used years ago to create a few PDFs, of which I've printed dozens of copies over the years.

Hope that's helpful! Music is cool!

Class advice lads. Very much appreciate the write ups!

Thanks for making this! I've been looking for something like this for a while.

Thanks - I really like app so far!

Thanks for the clarification about playing to a loop.

I have an iPhone and was thinking I could probably learn enough Garageband to create some simple loops that I could play along to. I’m currently at the stage where I’m still working on my timing and developing a solid rhythm (which doesn’t come naturally to me) so until now I’ve been focussing on strumming chords.

I’ve been following Justin Sandercoe’s lessons and was recently learning to play “A Girl Like You”¹. Up until this lesson, Justin always told the learner exactly what notes to play in a riff but for this one, he left it up to the learner to figure it out themselves. He gave enough clues for a beginner like me to figure it out (e.g., that notes are in the C minor pentatonic scale and that they go up and down followed by a big jump up, etc.). I had to listen very carefully and it took me a while but with the clues, I eventually figured out how to play the riff. I got a much greater buzz from learning this way, instead of simply being spoon-fed the notes so this has sparked my interest in ear-training and transscribing.

A looper pedal does sound like something that would be useful in the future when I start to learn more lead parts but I don’t think I’d benefit from it right now. Thanks, also, for the Hub Guitar recommendation. I hadn’t come across that site before and it looks like a good resource.

There’s a lot of bad shit in the modern world but if you want to learn music, it’s a great time to be alive: there are so many great resources for learning, good quality guitars are cheap, my €120 Spark Go modelling amp can emulate more tones than I could ever want, my smart-phone can be a metronome, tuner, ear-trainer, or digital audio workstation – and with Apple Music play 90% of the music I might want to listen to.

¹ https://www.justinguitar.com/songs/edwyn-collins-a-girl-like...

You can _definitely_ learn enough garage band to make a simple loop! It's very easy to set up, actually - at least on desktop, and I'm sure it's similar enough on the mobile app.

You can mark a section on the timeline to loop, and if you record when you're in that state, it'll just continually record to that same section of track. You can also set it up to do a metronome count in before actually recording. So, if you can manage to stay on time for 2 or 4 bars in one go, you can just record some quarter note strums into your phone mic - bang, perfectly serviceable loop for practice.

You can even start out with just a loop of a single chord to get a sense for how different notes sound against it in context. When that gets boring, do a little I-V or I-IV loop and try to notice the change in feel of different notes in, say, the major pentatonic scale for the root note. Then try a twelve bar blues, and then, ya know, whatever. It's a lot of fun, I'll often just toss out a quick loop and noodle if I've got ten minutes between meetings or a long build or something.

Just did. Couldn't do it from the iphone because it insists on reinstalling apple's mail app for every email links.

BTW, I believe you can leave an email on your profile, not sure if advisable though.