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Launched "Cadence: Guitar Theory" (https://cadenceguitar.com/) a guitar learning app with a focus on music theory in September.

Currently right above that $500/month when including lifetime purchases. Had a sizeable bump in October thanks to blowing up on here which also gave me an app store boost so thanks guys :)

I'm working on new lessons at the moment, after that I'll probably try to improve on the animations and sound effects to give the app more "juice", should be a fun thing to work on. Also still trying to figure out marketing and how to get visibility overall...

I'm no expert on this subject but I don't think this is how trademark law works.

If you type "Cadence" (or any other common name really) in a trademark database you will literally get hundreds of result from various countries and industries. I think as long as you're not offering a similar service or at least working on the same industry there is no way they would have a case against you.

Also there are actually quite a few apps which use the name Cadence already (a bike app, an event planning app, a running app...)

You're the third one to ask for it since this post so it will definitely be in the next update (in a week or so) as it should be quite easy to implement

You definitely can yes :)

I'm using RevenueCat for purchases and it also handles all the cross platform stuff

Hence why it could also technically work on the web with the same credentials but as I said, that's a story for another day...

Thanks for the info, definitely not an older device then ;)

I'll see what I can do to fix that but can't reproduce at the moment I'm affraid (using iphone 12), maybe simulator will help. Will also add some better handling of audio when the app goes in the background as that might be what causes bug number 2.

Thanks, I hope you will like it!

Technically the framework I'm using (flutter) is cross platform so I guess it could be possible but I'm affraid a few of the libs I use such as the ones for the audio are not and either way it would still need some adaptation to work well.

Not entirely impossible that I do it in the future but clearly not at the top of my list for the moment sorry!

Thank you for the feedback

There is supposed to be a short transition window when playing a new sound to prevent the popping issue. Is it on the "Note names" lesson recap? Also if you don't mind sharing your version of iPhone/iPad, I'm concerned some older devices might have performance issues since the audio is synthesized in real time, maybe increasing the window could help.

As for the audio being completely broken and needing an app restart it actually happened to me a couple times during development but I was never able to understand how or why it occured and haven't seen it again since months so no fix in sight...

Thanks :)

If by proposed practice you mean the tidy bits of guidelines at the end of some lessons, those are mostly just general tips for beginners more than a clear plan to follow.

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...

Thanks !

Funny I've always found the technicality of the guitar to be the easier part on the contrary.

Don't get me wrong, playing a piece like this cleanly and with such feel takes great skill and is probably not something I will ever be able to do but I mean easy in the sense that you can quite clearly see the path to take to get there (or halfway there). "Just" learn the piece slowly block by block, then repeat it for hundreds of hours without much thinking until it flows by itself (I'm simplifying but you get my point).

On the other hand, while theory can be grasped quite fast, applying it to your playing, composing, and improvising with it has always felt to me like a multifaceted beast that you have absolutely no idea which angle to tackle from. You just stumble your way around it until the pieces start clicking together and it's really hard to find a clear path to follow which makes it much harder imo, or at least more frustrating.

Gut feeling I suppose ? Pricing less felt like selling it short considering I still have quite a few features and content I want to add to the app, pricing more felt too much considering it's missing aforementioned features (:

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 intented meaning was more something like "Music theory applied for guitar" indeed but I can see the confusion

Good luck with your endeavours!

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

Thanks, good ol' wordpress still does the job

No clear methodology, I just tried for every lesson to bring the topic to its bare minimum for the easy difficulty, then add one layer for normal and one more for hard when possible, if not just adding more possible answers which is not ideal but some topics really are too specific to make variants.

As for the "progressive" difficulty mode, it just goes over the 3 levels so it's more of difficulty plateaus than a curve per say

Thanks :)

Thanks ! Flutter for front-end and PocketBase on a €5/month VPS for the backend (which is not even breaking a sweat despite the blow up of this post so really happy with that) + RevenueCat for purchase handling and Sentry for error reporting

Thanks, I'm not gonna lie it's probably not the best or at least should not be your only resource.

It can be pretty useful if you're someone that likes understanding how things work but for pure playing skills learning to play songs you like using a chord or tabs book/app/website or a better a teacher will probably get you started much quicker and you can learn the theory at any point later when you feel like it

Beginner lessons are free though so you can still check it out

I don't think the app alone will directly make you better at improvisation as this comes only from playing imo but it might make you better at practicing improvisation.

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 (:

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.

Thanks for the feedback

I'm not sure if it's allowed to post an email here so I'll refer you to the app itself: there is a "Support and contact" button on the settings page.

I'm definitely interested in seeing those screenshots if you can as text is supposed to wrap around nicely

Thanks :) hope you'll like it!

Thanks for the feedback

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

Thanks, not being well versed in design I just picked a small color palette I liked and sticked to it

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.

Thanks, I too have subscription-itus hence the lifetime option.

The subscription is mostly here for people who aren't sure and because you can't offer free trials on lifetime purchases

As the "other Tom" has said you can use the app without an account there is just a warning message telling you that if you do your progress is not backed up online.

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.

All but english and french (my native language) are machine generated yes sorry about that but there is quite a bit of text with all the lessons so I can't afford man made translations at my scale.

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

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.