HN user
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.
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.
Sure, please do keep the feedback coming. You can message us thru the site when logged in (we use Intercom for this) or email us at hello@getinstinct.com .
Haha - Actually, we've thought about it multiple times. With the right teacher, it wouldn't be that hard!
Haha, sorry about that, probably a bug.
If you don't mind sending us OS / browser / version + the lesson you played, we can try to debug. Our email is hello@getinstinct.com.
Hey, thx for writing! So the Firefox issue is that the browser asks for microphone approval on every lesson, which can get a little annoying as a user. Is there a way to get Firefox to ask only once and remember what the user chooses?
To see what happens, try a few lessons in real guitar mode on our staging box. This box allows getUserMedia() even for FF:
(also just a heads up that our staging box is small, so if a lot of people hit it, it might get slow)
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.
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. :)
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.
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).
Great point, totally agree.
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.
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.
Awesome to hear, I love the Beethoven lessons. Some classical stuff sounds really cool on a guitar (esp Beethoven on an electric).
Both good suggestions. We haven't found out a great way to handle scrolling with long notes yet. Also, agreed that it would be cool to show 1/4, 1/8 notes etc. Would love to find a subtle way to do it within tab, rather than with a tab/staff notes blend.
Old school :)
As long as the computer microphone can hear the guitar, you don't any hardware.
That said, if you want to plug your guitar into the computer microphone jack, you can. You just need the right adapter to go from the wide guitar cable to the thinner headphone jack.
This is a mic that has worked really well for our users. Not the prettiest but the audio is solid: http://www.amazon.com/Samson-Mic-Compact-USB-Microphone/dp/B...
It's possible that the server choked for a moment, it should be okay if you try again.
Edit: Also make sure you have JS enabled, otherwise the form won't work.
I'm one of the guys behind this, thx so much for all of the support (and to @yegg for posting).
Here's some more detail as requested by @ClayM and others...
The Year of Rock is the work of two guys, myself and @bsstoner. It's powered by the @getinstinct platform, which we also built.
Starting next week, we'll send a weekly guitar lesson by email to everyone who signs up. The lessons are entirely interactive. They listen as you play and give you feedback on each note, using pitch detection software we designed. You can demo some lessons we've already made at http://getinstinct.com
There's no human teacher, it's entirely automated and works in the web browser. The entire site is built in JS and HTML5 (including node.js on the backend), except for some Flash for the audio processing (unavoidable given the current state of browsers).
One thing that's cool about the Year of Rock is that the course is partially crowdsourced. After we create the intro lesson each week (such how to play a blues scale), our users can add practice music and riffs via our tab editor. There's a voting mechanism similar to HN or reddit to help the most popular submissions bubble to the top.
From a usability perspective, we've learned that the course needs to be more flexible than Code Year. Almost everyone will skip weeks or start late. Some people will enter the course with more experience than others. So the course can't be too linear. It should be okay for people to approach it like a buffet.
There's still plenty of time to adjust things, so would love to hear any questions/ideas/comments...
Yes it works with any guitar and you don't need a pickup or any cables. Because it listens thru the microphone, you can just sit near your computer and play your guitar like you normally would.
Ha okay - working on a more detailed comment.
Hey I'm one of the founders. The early weeks are focused on beginners and then it will get more advanced.
Yeah we love it for two reasons:
1. Our users can send messages to us from inside the app. They end us using this to communicate with us more than email.
2. The dashboard for site owners is awesome. It shows you overall user count, who is logged in right now, each user's social networks (pulled automatically using http://www.fullcontact.com), and gives you a whole bunch of ways to filter the information.
Intercom (http://intercom.io) - CRM and user messaging
Chartbeat (http://chartbeat.com) - Realtime analytics
Sendgrid (http://sendgrid.com) - Sending email from an app
Dropbox (http://dropbox.com) - File sharing/storage
CouchDB (http://couchdb.apache.org) - Flexible database
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.
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).
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.
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).
Good feedback, we're considering moving the signup flow to after the first lesson.
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.