Thanks HN, for helping me force Vineet's hand into accepting that the app is worthy of being used by not-Vineet.
He demo'd Captrice last week, to a bunch of friends here in Bangalore. And I knew he was going straight to the "infinite bikeshed", based on his tepid answers to questions like "Wow this is cool! So... Launch, when?".
Plus, you made m'dude earn his "First Internet Dollar". To whomever did the "buy me a coffee" thing... you're awesome! There is a stark psychological "before/after" of earning your F.I.D. Now he can't ever go back.
As someone stuck in his own Infinite Bikeshed, I take heart from this event, and hope to follow in his footsteps sooner than later :)
This looks super cool, and very similar to a need I have, except I'm not learning the guitar.
I'm learning my first (serious) instrument and I've decided on the lyre, since it's similar to other string instruments (guitar, ukulele, traditional harp) but a bit easier.
Will you support other instruments for lessons, other than the guitar?
I am going through the alphatex documentation in more detail and chances are that any stringed instrument could already be supported. Checkout the tuning section - https://alphatab.net/docs/alphatex/metadata#tuning.
I'd think about considering a more common instrument because you'll have a bigger support network.
You can find guitar teachers literally anywhere, guitar tabs are all over the internet, and you probably have friends who can give you a few pointers if you get stuck. Ukelele and bass guitar aren't that far behind.
I would suggest learning standard notation. Tabs are useful (since you often have a choice of what string to play any given note on, but which you choose matters both because different strings sound different, and because some strings will make the next note unreachable), but standard notation has benefits too. If you know both you have a chance of playing along with anyone else - most people will hand you standard notation when they want you to play background to solo, or play with in a group with you (this depends on what type of group - some groups will have tab some will not).
Cool! I guess there needs to be a way for people to share new lessons to practise, it gets complicated with copyright pretty fast.
For real "lessons" you'd probably need to start at chord progressions, go into scales and how the chords relate back to those, then move to these types of soloing technique lessons.
I've started to build this type of lessons sitea few times in the past and never really got it together enough to release anything. I've done scale/chord/arpeggio tools: https://github.com/webprofusion/scalex
Captrice allows you to export an exercise collection. You get a json file that can be shared with others or copied to another device where it can be imported back into the app.
> AlphaTab is the star here
Absolutely! High quality stuff. I wasn't aware of the person behind the project. Thanks for mentioning it.
What do you need "scales" practice for on guitar? It's a totally relative instrument except when playing on empty strings, so there's only one "scale" pattern that you have to learn. It's nothing like a keyboard!
Blues scales, various jazz scales, scales influenced by ragas or the countless other music traditions from around the world, microtonal scales, nonstandard tunings like fifths/DADGAD/DADF#A, scales with different fingering and picking patterns to increase movement speed in different directions, scales that are adjusted to use or avoid open strings because of the effects on ornamentation/drones/other techniques, scales that include sweeping sections or are entirely composed of sweeping arpeggios, etc.
There are dozens of scales to learn, with roots all over the fretboard. Each useful for different things. Just the basic minor pentatonic requires five different patterns. Eight note scales require eight different patterns, with various roots depending on the mode you want to play.
Scale patterns on a guitar are optimized for A: starting (lowest note 1) on a particular finger on a particular string and B: not sliding your hand up and down too much. For example, I know five major scale patterns: two start on the first string, two on the second, and one on the third.
Yea you can play the scales at any starting position to change the root note and the scale remains the same fret spacing as if you started with an open string, only now it starts at the fret you chose for the root. See 'fretboard logic' for more info.
Far fewer features than your app, but just having a tool to help nail down the muscle memory of pre-built progressions has been massively helpful for me as a banjo-player-in-training.
Your exercise builder is awesome and something I was planning on building into my site, might take some inspo!
It took me about 5 minutes to understand what this is doing.
For anyone else confused, it doesn't listen to you play, it just logs your use of the metronome and provides tabs.
IMO the app would be cooler if it was simply the metronome app on a page. And if you want to track which song you are working on, then just add the ability to label a session. Could have a different mode for people who want it over videos, but usually when I'm practicing, I know the tab and am not watching a video while I practice.
Thanks for the feedback. I know the UI is not as intuitive as I'd like it to be for first time users. Multiple early users have told me that they expected it to either listen to them play or play back some audio. I am planning to record a small videos soon to clarify this.
> IMO the app would be cooler if it was simply the metronome app on a page. And if you want to track which song you are working on, then just add the ability to label a session. Could have a different mode for people who want it over videos, but usually when I'm practicing, I know the tab and am not watching a video while I practice.
The tab is mainly for (1) future reference, specially if you are creating your own exercises (2) sharing them with others. Sometimes I come up with short exercises myself that cover a specific technique or some picking pattern I am struggling with. Overtime I tend to forget those. In an earlier version, you could either add a tab or embed a video. But then I thought why not both! Feedback taken though, it should be fairly easy to make the tab/video section collapsible. Ability to label sessions in also on the roadmap.
Recording and watching or listening to myself play has been very helpful for me. Even a temporary recording of just the current session, or most recent n minutes/beats would be nice. It's hard to evaluate execution in real time while performing it. To get it right as a user experience is not a simple task though. However, your great minimal feature set could also be seen as a plus to drive the practice routine efficiently no matter the quality, you'll get better too.
I never quite got the setup right, but Rocksmith seemed to live up to the promise of "guitar hero on a real guitar". It came out during a time when spending my free time tinkering with computers became much more important than tinkering with guitars.
I went into Rocksmith because of this promise and for me it worked out well. Though it did not greatly improve my guitar playing skills beyond some of the basics, I do enjoy that I can interact in some way with the music that I like. It's like whistling along with your favourite song but with your hands, so the experience is much more engaging and it's feels more rewarding than guitar hero as the sound that I'm making sound a lot more like music than that clicking of buttons.
Nowadays they have a subscription service, I don't know what the quality of that is. But I mostly still play on the "2014 remastered" edition with a "real tone cable" on macOS, but I think they updated that and you can play with any "audio interface" device you like. There is also the customsforge library for unofficial songs, but quality varies.
Between Rocksmith and Youtube tutorials, playing along with my favourite songs is the most fun I can get out off playing guitar that my skill level and time investment allows. I'll never play in a band or make a decent sounding song, but enjoying and getting enveloped by music is good enough.
I really wanted to like Rocksmith, but the progressive difficulty didn’t feel quite right. I would get stuck on new chords, try the recommended arcade games, get stuck on those even harder and less satisfying tasks, then lose motivation. By the time I picked it back up it didn’t respond to the fact that my skills had regressed and I had to start a new profile. I spent more time noodling in the tone modeler than anything.
Though I haven’t used this app I do plan on trying it out when I get my guitars back. I’m impressed at the effort, the resources, and the giving it free for the sake of spreading joy in music.
The guitar is a difficult instrument to learn, especially in the beginning phases. After 30 years it’s a conversation I have frequently - people try and give up a lot. If this can help some folks stick with it and become better understanding and practiced with their instrument, I hope that happens again and again and again. Every generation needs guitarists, as it’s the instrument of expressive rebellion the world round.
Great share and a Bill and Ted EXCELLENT weedly weedly weee!
I've tried playing guitar on and off my whole life over last 40 years and I can't believe that it took me until this year to try, on a whim, a classical guitar. Suddenly my fat fingers can fit next to each other making an A or B chord, and they don't hurt and blister after a short session of play. Seriously make sure to not overlook non-steel guitars if you're having trouble.
As a guy with “little girl hands” as John 5 jokingly calls it, I have a reverse issue with the classical and some jazz arch tops! SRV had giant bear paws by the way. Buckethead has alien hands (no fair).
If you’re game, on electric you might enjoy a baritone scale guitar. I got an LP style 27” by Agile (PRS makes a nice SE model) and it’s a neat dynamic.
Very glad you shared about your experience. Just as a note, don’t go near any EVH signature models - the neck and fretboard is like a Telecaster but smaller!
Some of the all time great bluesmen had fat sausage fingers so there's a bit more to it I suspect. After the same 40 years I got irritated one day and searched YouTube for "how do I play a C chord without muting strings" and found that my finger and wrist position was all wrong. Also spent a bunch of time watching Frampton, studying where his fingers go and what they look like.
> people try and give up a lot. If this can help some folks stick with it and become better understanding and practiced with their instrument, I hope that happens again and again and again
You’re welcome and much deserved! I’m grateful for the continued passion for the instrument. This helpful resource is a solid win for a hard-to-please community haha!
This looks neat. I'm interested in some of the more advanced exercises like the Rick Beato one here (https://app.captrice.io/?eid=ph79of6zlotm8y24mc4) but a couple of things prevented me from truly attempting it:
Firstly, the tab for that exercise is long enough to need a scroll bar, and so I don't understand how one is supposed to play along with that tab to a metronome... am I expected to operate the scroll bar every couple of measures while still staying in time with the metronome? So I would suggest either auto-scroll, or better yet just find a way to get all 12 measures of the exercise to fit on the screen at the same time. I have a big enough monitor that it would fit.
Secondly, although you have the link to the embedded video player, I wouldn't be able to keep the intended sound of the exercise in my head long enough that I would feel confident I was playing the exercise right later. The app really feels like it needs a synthesized guitar sound that would play the notes of the exercise, so that I could play it along with the synthesized version and know whether I was hitting the right note. It would be OK if it sounded cheesy -- that would be better than nothing, and then once I was confident that I had the correct sequence down, I would disable the synthetic sound.
> Firstly, the tab for that exercise is long enough to need a scroll bar, and so I don't understand how one is supposed to play along with that tab to a metronome.
I agree, this app is not great for learning a piece of music but it works well for practicing an already learnt piece. This is how I have been using it for myself.
As I mentioned in another comment, the tab and the video are mainly for reference i.e. to answer the question what to practice. Earlier, it only allowed either a tab or a video. At some point I added support for both (because why not!) Looks like that's causing some confusion.
I like your idea of playing along with a synthesized sound in the learning phase, although I haven't tried it myself. I believe alphatab (the lib used for tablature) does support midi playback which could make it function like guitar pro. Need to see how much complexity it introduces (mainly related to getting both the metronome and the midi to play together, never tried it). Perhaps there could be two separate modes to keep things simple - a learning mode without metronome and a practice mode (same as current). Won't promise anything but will at least do a POC.
Thanks for the detailed feedback.
PS: The link you shared wouldn't work for anyone else, as it only exists on your device thanks to the local-only-ness. Have some thinking to do to make this more intuitive.
Thanks! Much credit goes to the Bulma[1] css framework, I guess. I am mostly a backend dev. I've just used bulma for the most part and tried to avoid anything fancy.
Readit News
I had also posted on the "What are you working on?" thread yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43531684.
Happy to answer any questions.
He demo'd Captrice last week, to a bunch of friends here in Bangalore. And I knew he was going straight to the "infinite bikeshed", based on his tepid answers to questions like "Wow this is cool! So... Launch, when?".
Plus, you made m'dude earn his "First Internet Dollar". To whomever did the "buy me a coffee" thing... you're awesome! There is a stark psychological "before/after" of earning your F.I.D. Now he can't ever go back.
As someone stuck in his own Infinite Bikeshed, I take heart from this event, and hope to follow in his footsteps sooner than later :)
I'm learning my first (serious) instrument and I've decided on the lyre, since it's similar to other string instruments (guitar, ukulele, traditional harp) but a bit easier.
Will you support other instruments for lessons, other than the guitar?
It might even work for piano as well, there's an example here - https://alphatab.net/docs/alphatex/notes/#multiple-voices
You can find guitar teachers literally anywhere, guitar tabs are all over the internet, and you probably have friends who can give you a few pointers if you get stuck. Ukelele and bass guitar aren't that far behind.
For those who can't read sheet music, can I suggest a guitar tabs?
For real "lessons" you'd probably need to start at chord progressions, go into scales and how the chords relate back to those, then move to these types of soloing technique lessons.
AlphaTab is the star here https://github.com/CoderLine/alphaTab - it's been maintained tirelessly for years by Daniel Kuschny.
I've started to build this type of lessons sitea few times in the past and never really got it together enough to release anything. I've done scale/chord/arpeggio tools: https://github.com/webprofusion/scalex
> AlphaTab is the star here
Absolutely! High quality stuff. I wasn't aware of the person behind the project. Thanks for mentioning it.
The Guitar Grimoirr scale book is 200 pages!
Dead Comment
Far fewer features than your app, but just having a tool to help nail down the muscle memory of pre-built progressions has been massively helpful for me as a banjo-player-in-training.
Your exercise builder is awesome and something I was planning on building into my site, might take some inspo!
Definitely will be using your app.
For anyone else confused, it doesn't listen to you play, it just logs your use of the metronome and provides tabs.
IMO the app would be cooler if it was simply the metronome app on a page. And if you want to track which song you are working on, then just add the ability to label a session. Could have a different mode for people who want it over videos, but usually when I'm practicing, I know the tab and am not watching a video while I practice.
> IMO the app would be cooler if it was simply the metronome app on a page. And if you want to track which song you are working on, then just add the ability to label a session. Could have a different mode for people who want it over videos, but usually when I'm practicing, I know the tab and am not watching a video while I practice.
The tab is mainly for (1) future reference, specially if you are creating your own exercises (2) sharing them with others. Sometimes I come up with short exercises myself that cover a specific technique or some picking pattern I am struggling with. Overtime I tend to forget those. In an earlier version, you could either add a tab or embed a video. But then I thought why not both! Feedback taken though, it should be fairly easy to make the tab/video section collapsible. Ability to label sessions in also on the roadmap.
Nowadays they have a subscription service, I don't know what the quality of that is. But I mostly still play on the "2014 remastered" edition with a "real tone cable" on macOS, but I think they updated that and you can play with any "audio interface" device you like. There is also the customsforge library for unofficial songs, but quality varies.
Between Rocksmith and Youtube tutorials, playing along with my favourite songs is the most fun I can get out off playing guitar that my skill level and time investment allows. I'll never play in a band or make a decent sounding song, but enjoying and getting enveloped by music is good enough.
The guitar is a difficult instrument to learn, especially in the beginning phases. After 30 years it’s a conversation I have frequently - people try and give up a lot. If this can help some folks stick with it and become better understanding and practiced with their instrument, I hope that happens again and again and again. Every generation needs guitarists, as it’s the instrument of expressive rebellion the world round.
Great share and a Bill and Ted EXCELLENT weedly weedly weee!
If you’re game, on electric you might enjoy a baritone scale guitar. I got an LP style 27” by Agile (PRS makes a nice SE model) and it’s a neat dynamic.
Very glad you shared about your experience. Just as a note, don’t go near any EVH signature models - the neck and fretboard is like a Telecaster but smaller!
> people try and give up a lot. If this can help some folks stick with it and become better understanding and practiced with their instrument, I hope that happens again and again and again
This resonates so much.
Firstly, the tab for that exercise is long enough to need a scroll bar, and so I don't understand how one is supposed to play along with that tab to a metronome... am I expected to operate the scroll bar every couple of measures while still staying in time with the metronome? So I would suggest either auto-scroll, or better yet just find a way to get all 12 measures of the exercise to fit on the screen at the same time. I have a big enough monitor that it would fit.
Secondly, although you have the link to the embedded video player, I wouldn't be able to keep the intended sound of the exercise in my head long enough that I would feel confident I was playing the exercise right later. The app really feels like it needs a synthesized guitar sound that would play the notes of the exercise, so that I could play it along with the synthesized version and know whether I was hitting the right note. It would be OK if it sounded cheesy -- that would be better than nothing, and then once I was confident that I had the correct sequence down, I would disable the synthetic sound.
I agree, this app is not great for learning a piece of music but it works well for practicing an already learnt piece. This is how I have been using it for myself.
As I mentioned in another comment, the tab and the video are mainly for reference i.e. to answer the question what to practice. Earlier, it only allowed either a tab or a video. At some point I added support for both (because why not!) Looks like that's causing some confusion.
I like your idea of playing along with a synthesized sound in the learning phase, although I haven't tried it myself. I believe alphatab (the lib used for tablature) does support midi playback which could make it function like guitar pro. Need to see how much complexity it introduces (mainly related to getting both the metronome and the midi to play together, never tried it). Perhaps there could be two separate modes to keep things simple - a learning mode without metronome and a practice mode (same as current). Won't promise anything but will at least do a POC.
Thanks for the detailed feedback.
PS: The link you shared wouldn't work for anyone else, as it only exists on your device thanks to the local-only-ness. Have some thinking to do to make this more intuitive.
[1]: https://bulma.io/