What's new in Captrice - July 2025
Welcome to the July edition of the Captrice newsletter! Running a bit late with this one as I was traveling in the last few days.
This month, I finally managed to put together a short demo video for Captrice. It took quite a few rewrites and more takes than I care to admit. I've gained new found respect for YouTubers!
Anyway, I believe this video precisely explains, in under 3 minutes, how Captrice can be used to practice guitar effectively.
BTW, Captrice has a YouTube channel now. Do like, share, subscribe ;-)
Moving on to the notable features released this month.
Journal notes
You can now jot down notes after your practice sessions. Whether you want to record how a session felt, what you struggled with or found easy, or what to work on next time, you can now keep track of all such things right inside Captrice. It’s a pretty simple feature for now, but I’ve got a lot more journaling ideas lined up, so stay tuned!
Cleaner Practice and Learning Modes
A while back I added a Learning Mode that lets you hear how the exercise sounds through an embedded MIDI player. But it turned out that users didn’t even notice it was there. The old “headphones” icon was a bit confusing. So I’ve tried making it more obvious.
Tempo control in Learning mode
The tempo field similar to the one on metronome is added for the MIDI player too, so you can learn tricky parts at your own pace.
Performance improvements
This month too, I’ve shipped a few under-the-hood improvements to keep everything running faster and smoother, so things should feel snappier all around.
Additions to the library
This month I added a new piece to the library:
Sixpounder 2nd Solo: The solo from Sixpounder by Children of Bodom.
Tip of the month
Let’s be honest - if all you're practicing is guitar exercises, it can get boring pretty fast. Being able to play exercises is not the main goal. But they can be incredibly effective for training your hands and mind for real music.
One of the motivations behind Captrice was to tame the guitar solos that I find a bit too challenging by breaking them down into short, focused exercises. Take this month’s library addition as an example - Sixpounder solo is fast (around 142 BPM) but if you try out the solo even once, you'll quickly realize that there are only two main patterns:
An alternate picking section with wide finger stretches
A legato section with string skipping
Both repeat a few times, so isolating these and practicing them in repetition is a great way to level up your technique and learn a song at the same time. If you’re into this genre of music, your motivation to play will be sky-high! And thanks to that if you are able to manage 16th notes comfortably at 142 bpm, there’s a good chance those techniques, speed and ideas will start to show up naturally in your own music.
When I started building Captrice, this is how I imagined myself using it and I recommend you give it a try too.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading. Please don't hesitate to get in touch for anything at vineet@captrice.io or naikvin@gmail.com.
More updates next month!