Welcome to the September 2025 edition of the Captrice newsletter.

Feature-wise, I am quite happy with the current state of Captrice, so I've kinda shifted focus more towards speaking with existing/potential users as well as guitar teachers. I want to understand their pain points and build something that solves actual challenges.

This month, I reached out to an accomplished guitarist and a music educator from my city. Although nothing serious has materialized yet out of this interaction, he was kind enough to reply back with positive comments and appreciation for my work. It's quite encouraging to me, specially coming from someone I respect and admire greatly.

New library collection for beginners

I am helping out a couple of beginners get started with guitar and one common challenge they complain about is learning how to change chords smoothly in order to play songs. Quite understandably, this is a common hurdle that every guitar faces in the beginning. So I wondered if it'd be possible to add exercises in Captrice to help learn and practice this skill. That exploration resulted in the new Chord changing exercises collection which is now available in the Captrice library. There is also an accompanying youtube short that quickly explains the approach.

I am not a guitar teacher, so these are exercises I picked up from somewhere back in the day (unfortunately I don't remember the source). But the underlying approach has helped me immensely. Even today, if I am having trouble with unfamiliar chord shapes, I find myself going back to the techniques. There are 3 exercises, which need to be practiced with a metronome (of course!) and with multiple chords.

To add these exercises in Captrice in a way that they are beginner-friendly, I had to implement a few missing features:

1. The tablature and the midi player get updated when the user selects a variation. Chords are added as variations in these exercises, so that the user can practice each exercise with multiple chords.

2. The learning mode now displays chord diagrams based on the selected variations. Shout out to the brilliant alphatab library that does all the heavy lifting here.

The label for variations dropdown can now be customized. In the above gifs, notice the labels “Chord” and “Transition” besides the variation dropdown instead of plain old “Variation”.

Right now, these features are implemented rather crudely. Based on user feedback, I will soon work on stabilizing them for general use. I believe such tools will prove to be quite handy in the teachers edition of Captrice, which is on the roadmap.

A couple of questions for Captrice users

1. What other beginner-focused exercises should I add to the Captrice library?

2. Would you like Captrice better as a desktop app instead of a web/in-browser app?

Please let me know by email at vineet@captrice.io or naikvin@gmail.com.

So that was the short update for September. Thanks for reading and for being a subscriber. Please do share this app with other guitarists in your circle who may find it useful.