←back to thread

Show HN: Cadence – A guitar theory app

(cadenceguitar.com)
184 points apizon | 1 comments | 13 Oct 25 10:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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...)

Show context
thomask1995 ◴[22 Oct 25 16:53 UTC] No.45671909[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>45672099 #
1. apizon ◴[22 Oct 25 17:06 UTC] No.45672099[source]▶
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...