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Fretello
p/fretelloStep-by-step guitar lessons for beginners
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Chris Messina

Fretello - AI-powered guitar lessons

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Top Hunter
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Fretello is an AI-based music education app that empowers people to express themselves through music by inspiring and teaching guitar in an interactive and fun way. After iOS and Android, you can now learn the guitar on macOS Catalina.

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Florian Lettner
Maker
Hey, Florian here, co-founder of Fretello. I'm excited to announce the launch of Fretello for Mac. Here at Fretello, we empower people to express themselves through music by teaching them guitar in an interactive and fun way. Back in the days, I spent hours evaluating thousands of online and offline guitar tutorials and still needed a better solution. Why? Because none of the existing solutions gave feedback and told me if I was doing things right, where I was making mistakes and how I could recover from that. That’s why we create a smarter way of learning a musical instrument: * Minimizing the time for finding the right exercises for you * Guiding you in executing the exercises the right way, progressing at the right speed and consistently getting better with feedback * Centralizing guitar learning, practicing and playing songs into one tool * Using AI-powered technology to not only analyze what you play but also give you invaluable feedback to progress at your own speed Overall, the method behind Fretello helped me step up my guitar game like I could not have expected before. And today, half a million guitarists worldwide benefit from it. It's free to sign up, so give it a test drive! We'd love to hear your feedback (and criticism), so we'll know how to make this tool even better. Try it out for free, and let us know what you think!
tulip dutta
I have always wanted to learn this instrument and I finally have a chance at learning this without much hassle. Totally recommend this!
Florian Lettner
Maker
@tulip_dutta Thank you for your kind words. Don't hesitate to reach out to us, if you have any questions or feedback!
Lorena Lopez
From a development standpoint, what does it mean to use Catalyst, which was introduced in macOS Catalina?
Florian Lettner
Maker
@ana_lorena, that's an interesting question. Basically, Catalyst allows us to easily bring an existing iOS app with a layout that's optimized for iPads to the Mac platform. The Fretello iPhone, iPad and now also the Mac App share a large portion of source code. The layout however is optimized for each and every platform, taking platform specific UX concepts into account.
philipp_baldauf
Love the idea! Does it actually "hear" if I make mistakes? The video showed a quick pop-up saying "this didn't sound right"?
Florian Lettner
Maker
@philipp_baldauf, yes it does. We are using CoreML in combination with neuronal networks to analyze the user's performance in real-time. The app is able to pick up your guitar signal from the microphone and give you feedback and instructions on how to recover from your mistakes. This is especially useful, if you are at the very beginning of your guitar journey.
Michaela
?makers do you use macOS Catalyst specific components, and if yes, which ones?
Florian Lettner
Maker
@michihil17, yes we do. The main challenge was obviously going from touch to mouse interaction which has a major impact on how people navigate the app. That's why we switched from tab navigation to a native sidebar. This actually allowed us to adopt a desktop-like interface that looks native to mac users.
Gregor Pichler
Do you think your user base increases after including macOS Catalina as a platform, or does your audience prefer to use your app on a smartphone?
Florian Lettner
Maker
@ipgregor, optimizing learning content for small screens always has been a challenge. Since a lot of our users have been using tablets at least in parallel to their phones, taking the app to an even bigger screen was a logical consequence. It gives users the option to learn and practice from their home studio or workplace, which I for example do as well. A bigger screen allows us to display more details. All in all, yes, we do believe that having the possibility to learn with your Mac will increase our user base significantly.
Sudhanjali Sethi
Not only do I love the idea behind this application, but also the fact that it can help me learn especially during these times when I want to learn this instrument but attending offline classes isn't possible. Kudos to the team!
Florian Lettner
Maker
@sudhanjali_sethi Thanks, we recently also started to team up with musicians all over the world to help them make a living for sharing their knowledge.
Vivian Covatti
Which are the biggest benefits of supporting the macOS Catalina as a platform?
Wolfgang Damm
Maker
@vivian_covatti Being able to reach more users, making use of a bigger screen. Adopting for a bigger screens (Mac) also helped us to improved our iPad experience.
Aman Goel
i really like this product! :)
Florian Lettner
Maker
@aman_goel Thanks for the feedback :-)
Patrick
How do you use CoreML, and what for?
Florian Lettner
Maker
@patrick_fischer1, as already mentioned above, we use CoreML to analyze our users' performance, give feedback and measure their progress through the device's microphone. Given the size of audio recordings, off-site analysis on a server has never been a feasible option for our team. Uploading audio files to a server, remotely processing them there and sending the results back would drain mobile data packages and doesn't allow for real-time processing. For this purpose, we developed and trained our own ML models, which are highly optimized for our use case and reasonably small compared to other, default models and use CoreML to analyze audio signals directly on the phones. Thanks to the Apple Bionic chip we can rely on a powerful, hardware accelerated environment, providing us with everything we need to run our calculations in real-time.
Nadine Klaffenböck
Why did you decide to launch with macOS Catalina?
Florian Lettner
Maker
@nadine_klaffenbock, for us it is a great opportunity to reach users that prefer the Mac setup over mobile. In addition, a bigger screen will allow the app to display more content.
Miriam Luisa
?makers What are the challenges of switching from a smartphone device to the macOS Catalina?
Florian Lettner
Maker
@miriam_luisa, the user interaction moves from touching a screen to using pointer and keyboard. Additionally, the screen size is significantly bigger.
Markus
?makers, it's quite interesting to see that your app works both on mobile devices and Mac. How did you handle the interaction from touch screen to a desktop environment?
Wolfgang Damm
Maker
@markushi We needed to adapt some of the UI concepts for the desktop experience. E.g. swiping left/right is easy on a touchscreen, for desktop we added additional elements to reveal content to the left and right. Other parts were more straight forward to translate to the desktop's point and click interactions.
Andreas Roettl
Do you plan to make this available for other instruments too? I'm playing piano.
Florian Lettner
Maker
@charlybr0wn Definitely. As a first step we will take this forward to bass and other string instruments first.
Naimil Shah
Does it work with other instruments. Say anything form a Drum to Percussion instrument? If no are there any plans of introducing the same anytime soon?
Florian Lettner
Maker
@naimil_shah We currently support acoustic and electric guitars. Our technology is desined in a way that it works with any instrument. We will bring the app to other instruments soon.
Ryan Hoover
Wish I had this when I tried to learn the guitar in college
Florian Lettner
Maker
@rrhoover Me too :-)
Marco Chiang
downloaded and going through onboarding - right after selecting that i can read tabs i encountered "Something went wrong. please try again" message
Florian Lettner
Maker
@marco_chiang Thanks for letting us know. We'll have a look asap.