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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: 0.206s | 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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jealousgelatin ◴[22 Oct 25 09:46 UTC] No.45666799[source]▶
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.

replies(3): >>45668778 #>>45670098 #>>45672906 #
1. apizon ◴[22 Oct 25 18:05 UTC] No.45672906[source]▶
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.