Show HN: Cadence – A Guitar Theory App
9 comments
·October 13, 2025xcf_seetan
The name is misleading. Initially i thought it was about creating new guitar designs. First time i heard "Guitar Theory", maybe OP was thinking about Music Theory, which, in itself, is a vast subject. It is more a harmony app, a.k.a. a Guitar Chord App. Other than that, it is a nice app to learn how to play individual chords.
criddell
I’m trying this on my iPad.
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.
jealousgelatin
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.
postepowanieadm
Very nice! What's under the hood?
erdemo
The interface looks very clean, I will definitely a go this one. Good job man!
jpfromlondon
I made something very similar that looks hideous by comparison, and lacks the ear-training aspect!
oulipo2
Looking great!
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...)