Show HN: HTML5 guitar lessons with pitch detection

by b1ake • 12 years ago

218 59 12 years ago

b1ake13• 12 years ago

We first launched here on HN 1.5 years ago, and we're pretty excited to share v2.

Our goal with Instinct is to add deep interactivity to any music lesson. We think that one day, every lesson on YouTube might have pitch detection, scrolling notation, a scoring system and personalized feedback.

This v2 is a big first step in that direction. We've teamed up with a bunch of online teachers to create fully interactive video courses, as a way of showing what's possible with the tech.

There's much more to do though! At this stage, we're looking for as much input as possible from users and teachers.

linhmtran168• 12 years ago

Please add the function to see music sheet alongside guitar tab. It will be a great help for any serious guitar learner.

b1ake13• 12 years ago

Great point, totally agree.

natejenkins2• 12 years ago

I've been learning guitar for about 5 years now and would consider myself a serious guitar learner (i.e. I could happily play all day given the time). As a reformed sheet music reader during my saxophone playing youth, I would disagree with the idea that serious players should learn to read music, at least not at first. Serious learners should work on the most important part of any instrument: their ears. I don't read sheet music or tabs on guitar, and while I'm not Slash or BB King, I am confident that I could learn either of their songs by ear without too much trouble. I might never get fully up to speed on a Slash solo, or have the nuance of BB King, but reading music won't teach you either of those anyway. I'd suggest getting a program that can slow down music without changing pitch, I personally use Transcribe and am reasonably happy with it, and try learning one of your favorite songs by ear.

It will be painful at first if you don't naturally have good ears, it was painful for me (which is why I avoided doing so on saxophone), but the payoff is huge. It changes you as a musician. I've heard songs on the radio where I knew the chord progression and thus knew how to play the song before even picking up the guitar, that is pretty cool. I might come up with a bit of a song in the shower or in the car and when I sit down at the guitar and figure it out. Neither of these would be possible if I hadn't put in the hours listening to bits of songs again and again.

At the same time, if you are a beginner or intermediate player, I'd recommend justinguitar.com to get started. His youtube channel is extensive, and he and Marty Schwartz were my two main guitar teachers.

Also, I've met people who have played guitar for some time but cannot play bar chords. This simply shouldn't happen. There will be a song you want to play where you will need a bar chord, and you will either have to learn how to play bar chords or learn a way to "cheat" on that particular chord. Bar chords are awesome, piano players would kill to have a movable shape that makes transcription trivial (they'd also kill for a capo). They are well worth the initial effort and once you can finally play them you'll realize that they aren't that hard.

it_learnses• 12 years ago

I bought a guitar 3 years ago and I've tried to learn it on and off but never really went past the c chord because I always lose interest.

I just finished my first lesson and this is superb for me. I love the scoring system which motivates me to try and do better each time and just the ease and simplicity with which I can immerse myself into learning it at my own pace.

Just a minor thing that confused me was that the music tab layout(maybe that's the standard) is different from the layout of the strings in the animation (which is the same as my guitar). I think both should be the same as the guitar.

unit009• 12 years ago

"Just a minor thing that confused me was that the music tab layout(maybe that's the standard) is different from the layout of the strings in the animation (which is the same as my guitar). I think both should be the same as the guitar."

I agree. Tabs are normally an inversion of the guitar, or more accurately, how you view the strings when looking down at the guitar in your lap (high string is on the "top" of the neck, low string on the "bottom" of the neck)

i also found the left handed guitar player a little weird :)

b1ake13• 12 years ago

Awesome, so glad that your first lesson was a good experience!

Yeah I agree about the layout of strings in tab notation being confusing as a new guitarist. We wanted to default to the standard layout for tab, but then it gets a little confusing because it's different than the guitar layout below.

One trick with Instinct is that you can flip the notation by clicking on the string names along the left side of the tab.

In the future, we also want to give you the option to flip the guitar, but so far we've only implemented that in our pro courses (i.e. the courses that have pictures of real teachers on them).

bmelton2• 12 years ago

I haven't tried Instinct, but having learned guitar off and on many years ago, the biggest 'leap' I made between knowing a few chords, and a few riffs, and actually learning enough to pick up a guitar at a party without embarrassing myself occurred when I started learning full-length songs.

There are a plethora of very simple songs that are super easy to play, and if you learn some that people might like singing along to (even guiltily, like "Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive"), you'll likely bound ahead in skill by a lot.

To that effect, I'd recommend hitting up YouTube for an instructor like Marty Schwartz (user 'martyzsongs') and finding some of his easy tutorials, then learning a few songs to string together. Get 15-20 of those easy songs under your belt, and everything starts getting a lot easier from there.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=martyzsings+easy

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

Have you ever heard of Rocksmith?

sjs382• 12 years ago

Looks great. Can't wait to try it after work!

Killswitch2• 12 years ago

How do you even play the demo? I move my mouse and the hand moves with it, and it tells me to play the string, but I click, hold, press buttons, the hand just moves and nothing happens... A help screen would be very beneficial...

b1ake13• 12 years ago

Ah in demo mode, just move the mouse over the highlighted strings at the bottom and they will play. No need to click or anything.

Killswitch2• 12 years ago

Did that, nothing happened. Just air guitar like a gangsta.

ozten• 12 years ago

Firefox 30, Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202 enabled, Ubuntu 14.10 - I see the flash dialog, but am unable to allow access to my microphone.

Why not use getUserMedia({audio:true}) instead?

carlesfe• 12 years ago

I second that. Flash does not work well for me, a fully functional HTML5 version would totally get my money.

b1ake13• 12 years ago

Yeah we like HTML5 / WebRTC a lot better too. In Chrome, Instinct actually uses WebRTC instead of flash to access the mic.

We had a few issues with Firefox WebRTC though, still trying to work through those.

maguirre• 12 years ago

Ha, time to dust up my guitar. I've always wanted to learn but know nothing of musical notation. This should give me another excuse get back to learning

pbhjpbhj2• 12 years ago

Really great - played first lesson. Second lesson crashed on https://getinstinct.com/courses/intro-to-guitar/amazing-grac... before I could play along with the review of part-1.

Would like regular music notation as I already know that. Also it's a bit quiet, would love to have a voice guide rather than just reading the prompts.

One slight problem is that on parts where the section to play starts on the same note as the end, and uses an open string, the sustained note of the string automatically skips the first note of the repeat playthrough. Perhaps the algo needs to look for an amplitude peak at the start of the students playthrough to avoid this?

Incidentally the tuner is better than any of the simple tuners I've used on Android, haven't tried it on my phone however. It coped with my children talking over it and still helped me tune very quickly.

b1ake13• 12 years ago

Great points, and thanks so much for the kind words about the tuner.

Agree that sheet music would be great, and also that the lessons do feel a little quiet / less lively than they could. Your voiceover idea is really cool. We've also thought about adding backing tracks as another way to increase the energy level.

We've also run into that wraparound issue you describe, where a section that starts and ends with the same note can cause an issue when you get to the end and sustain the note. I think you're right about the solution, i.e. better attack detection by looking at the amplitude of the signal.

pbhjpbhj2• 12 years ago

I'm sure it's on your list of possible future enhancements but I'd be interested in a Ukulele version.

Now I've done 4 full lessons and some riffs - I'm finding the scrolling on the tab a bit hard to follow, TBH I think it would be fine if it were a bit more compressed (so less scrolling were needed) and also possibly you could but a visual break [like a coloured vertical bar or similar] so that the eye can more easily pick out the move? Happy to give further feedback, I'm pbhj on your system.

simonsquiff• 12 years ago

Any plans for other instruments? Would be really interested in a piano version

b1ake13• 12 years ago

Yeah I'd love for us to make a piano version too. We haven't started it yet, but maybe it's percolating - I've been spending a ton of time on the piano lately. :)

ddon• 12 years ago

Kickstarter... here you come... :)

selmnoo• 12 years ago

I would be really, really happy if you can get a piano version out soon. :)

TheSpiceIsLife• 12 years ago

Have you heard of Synthesia?[1]

Works with any (most?) midi keyboards. I use it with an M-Audio ProKeys 88 (weighted keys). It's an awesome program. You can load any .mid file in to it and select the instruments you want to play on keys, and have it display the sheet music along with the note cascade.

I cannot recommend this program enough, and the learning method in general. Synthesia and YouTube videos have been my sole learning method / teaching aid, and in the past 18 months I've learned to play a handful of short pieces well enough to put a huge grin on my face.

1. http://www.synthesiagame.com/

(Edit: speeling and gramma)

zapt02• 12 years ago

Any ukulele lessons coming up? :D

b1ake13• 12 years ago

Haha - Actually, we've thought about it multiple times. With the right teacher, it wouldn't be that hard!

chrisstanchak• 12 years ago

+1 for the Uke.

Nice stuff, Blake.

sitkack• 12 years ago

I wish you a resounding success, thank you for making more art and artists in the world.

KevinBongart• 12 years ago

Wow, really impressive. I tried the first Jazz lesson, completed it, was prompted to register, happily signed up and I'm very excited about the other lessons!

markbnj• 12 years ago

This is pretty awesome. Nice work! I've been playing for 30 years but I am eager to try it out and learn some new stuff :).

hpeinar2• 12 years ago

I got a acoustic guitar for birthday and from since I've sat hours before Youtube videos and tried to learn it. It has been a bumpy ride and I've merely learned anything. Mainly because it's hard to learn from the people who are already good players. They play fast and keeping track with them using YouTube video player is really annoying.

Today I found GetInstinct and tried it out for like 30 minutes. I feel I've accomplished something and what is more important for me, I feel I've learned something.

It's easy, understandable and really enjoyable.

You'll make dozens (if not millions) of people enjoy playing guitar and hopefully other instruments. Keep up the good work!

elwell• 12 years ago

Is testimonial writing your profession? But, seriously, this is a pretty nifty app.

hpeinar2• 12 years ago

Heh, no. I'm a professional programmer (go figure...)

misnome• 12 years ago

Sorry, Flash isn't playing nice with your browser. Try refreshing or use another browser.

HTML5 indeed. Though I suppose taken literally the title doesn't claim html5 for the pitch detection part.

RossM• 12 years ago

I've just been watching this IO talk on WebRTC, so it's certainly possible in Chrome and Firefox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMH1vM-dSc0

bsstoner• 12 years ago

It actually does use WebRTC in Chrome. It falls back to Flash in FF right now.

b1ake13• 12 years ago

Yeah the core of the pitch detection is in Flash, so that it can work in browsers that don't yet support HTML5 audio, such as Safari, and in older browsers. But where possible, we do grab the audio and do some of the signal processing using HTML5. Also, all of the UI is HTML5 and JS.

robmcm• 12 years ago

To be pedantic Flash is included in the HTML 5 spec via the object tag.

SimeVidas• 12 years ago

Flash is embedded into HTML via <object>, but that has nothing to do with the HTML5 spec. Flash is not part of the Web Platfrom or HTML5.

stravid• 12 years ago

easydrum[1] is a similar student project dedicated to drums. As far as I know it uses MIDI and the flash plugin to connect to electronic drums.

[1] http://easydrum.binsofrei.at/

mrcharles• 12 years ago

Pretty neat! I plugged in my rocksmith cable and it just works. One thing though, it needs some kind of calibration. The tiniest bit of string noise and the lessons shoot off without me, even when I have my strings muted.

b1ake13• 12 years ago

Yes it does work with the Rocksmith cable and we've seen a bunch of users discovering that. As you point out, pitch detection can be a little sensitive with that cable (depending on the guitar), and you're right that we could / should do some calibrating to improve it.

dbalatero• 12 years ago

Not sure how closely you pay attention to what fingerings are shown, but on this lesson: https://getinstinct.com/courses/intro-to-guitar/low-strings/...

I noticed the last 4 notes are fingered 2-1-1-open, which has a slide on the first finger. Probably better to not encourage sliding on first finger unless needed. I wonder if other lessons might have less than optimal fingerings shown?

edit: but, very cool! :)

bwindels• 12 years ago

Wow, I love this. Played around with it this morning and works surprisingly well. Great idea and great execution, wish you all the best.

riffraff• 12 years ago

any chance you have ukulele coming up next? :)

Show HN: HTML5 guitar lessons with pitch detection

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