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Show HN: Cadence – A guitar theory app

(cadenceguitar.com)
184 points apizon | 1 comments | 13 Oct 25 10:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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...)

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babblingfish ◴[22 Oct 25 16:02 UTC] No.45671172[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>45671930 #
1. apizon ◴[22 Oct 25 16:54 UTC] No.45671930[source]▶
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.