Strum
A follow-along guitar app for my son
Self-initiated
My son is learning guitar. Tabs online are a wall of numbers and lyrics, and he'd lose his place long before the first chord change. What he needed was simpler: the chord to play now, the one coming next, and when to strum. So I built that.
The big box shows the chord and lights up each strum in time. On the last strum, the next chord slides up into its place, so there's a moment to get your fingers ready. The guitar sound is made in the browser, so any chord works without a single recording. There's a tuner, a chord change trainer, and a Listen mode that hears you strum and waits for you instead of the clock.
Every song is a chord chart written for the app. There's no open database of popular songs to plug in, because the songs belong to the people who wrote them. So the charts stick to chords, structure and strum patterns. Riff songs like Enter Sandman become warm-up drills instead.
It borrows a little from Duolingo: a daily goal, a streak and a few badges. Turns out that works on guitar practice too.