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Show HN: Cadence – A guitar theory app

(cadenceguitar.com)
184 points apizon | 6 comments | 13 Oct 25 10:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.293s | source | bottom

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...)

1. jcjmcclean ◴[22 Oct 25 15:45 UTC] No.45670885[source]▶
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?

replies(2): >>45671105 #>>45672282 #
2. Rendello ◴[22 Oct 25 15:58 UTC] No.45671105[source]▶
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

3. apizon ◴[22 Oct 25 17:21 UTC] No.45672282[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>45673736 #
4. Rendello ◴[22 Oct 25 19:11 UTC] No.45673736[source]▶
> 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?

replies(1): >>45673788 #
5. apizon ◴[22 Oct 25 19:14 UTC] No.45673788{3}[source]▶
Good luck with your endeavours!

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

replies(1): >>45674708 #
6. Rendello ◴[22 Oct 25 20:26 UTC] No.45674708{4}[source]▶
Hopefully you can reap the benefits of the sowing, both monetarily and skill-wise!