Show HN: A virtual guitar teacher (after 18 months of dev) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A virtual guitar teacher (after 18 months of dev)

getinstinct.com

20 pointsb1ake17 comments

Hi everyone, this is v1 of an app we've been working on for a really long time. It uses pitch detection and note-by-note feedback to guide beginners through their first songs on the guitar.

Everything's homemade, including the pitch detection and the animated guitar teacher. We decided to go web-first (which was definitely out of style when we started) and built everything in JS (Backbone/Node/Couch).

Today we finally launched, would love any feedback people have.

Can you please show me what it is and does without me having to sign up? At least, explain what it is on the About rather than talking about your dream and effort.

Good feedback, we're considering moving the signup flow to after the first lesson.

This seems awesome to me as well but I don't want to sign up without learning more. Who are the teachers? How does it work? Does it cost anything? etc.

Really cool concept, I think.

Actually there are no human teachers, the lessons are interactive and automated much like Codecademy. You're shown a few notes at a time and then as you play, the software detects each note and gives you feedback. There's also a virtual guitar mode so you can try it out without a guitar (it does require a signup though, at least for now).

That's good info - you need to have a "How it works" page rather than ask for the details before you share that. I love the idea though!

Same here, I love guitars and I love web apps but I hate signing up for something without knowing what it does... A video would be awesome!

This is awesome ! I tried my hand at some chord recognition a few days ago : https://github.com/jcaille/Chords. I only compare chords to fingerprints I recorded, and do not extract pitch or anything. I'm looking for feedback or pointers on how to go further (mainly, discarding the fingerprints altogether)

Have you considered teaching chords and such ? Another cool feature would be to let people enter their own songs, or connect with a tab API to expand the library.

Just browsed through your code, very cool! We're working on chord recognition as we speak and went down a similar road in the beginning. Would love to chat more about this, shoot me an email (blake at getinstinct).

Who is your audience? It's not that clear from my first visits.

Right, good question. We're focused on beginners, especially people who have never touched a guitar. The goal is to get them playing recognizable songs within the first few minutes. To that end, we want the experience to be as friendly and patient as possible.

ok. that wasn't obvious from my initial sign-up and look around, from my mobile. I'm a big fan of cartoon-style graphics but not at the expense of clarity and focus. I'm not really your target audience; I play piano, however my brother and father are definitely in your group. so, I could really use more information to help me decide if this could be for me. what do I need? why the wide-open space, sky and clouds? is my choice of avatar important? wasn't avatar an expensive movie? is this free? (hope this isn't too negative but I presume u would prefer constructive comments rather than 'awesome graphics' statements. we know they're awesome but that don't get u signups converting to payments.)

Yeah I'm with you. We've had trouble conveying the experience in words. Once people try it, they get it, and that suggests that we need to reduce the friction in trying it.

Some answers to your specific questions - Yes it's free, and all you need is a guitar (any acoustic or electric is fine) and a computer that has a microphone built in. There's no special cables or microphone required.