Show HN: Cadence – A guitar theory app (cadenceguitar.com)
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...)
49 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 72.2 ms ] threadI’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.
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.
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.
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.
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
…have you yourself actually tried it? Where was your technique and where is it now?
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...
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
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?
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.
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 (:
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).
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?
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.
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!