Show HN: Hanon Pro – piano technique and exercises for the digital age

I tried it, I guess I'm your target market, I'm relatively new to keyboard, trying to learn, and do happen to have a Bluetooth MIDI adapter.

A few notes and observations from a quick trial run below:

- the app crashed out a few times when connecting to my MIDI controller (a Yamaha MD-BT01 dongle that plugs into the old school MIDI plugs on the keyboard). Not sure what's going on there, but it happened a few times. - the feedback given seemed quite helpful, I like that wrong notes were highlighted, and it seemed to do well at ignoring a false-start that I made while trying it out. - I would have liked if the playback functionality supported MIDI too; I play with headphones on and it's a bit weird (and annoying for other people in the house) if the playback comes out of the iPad. - I would also like the ability to start from a bar of my choice and maybe even evaluate a one or two bar section at a time rather than having to play the whole piece

On the whole though I think it's a good app, and I intend to use it more. I don't share the concerns of others about the price of the sheet music, I think your pricing is reasonable, and assume it takes some effort for you to translate into a form that can be used.

Well done, thanks for sharing.

For reference "Hanon" is a classic book of piano exercises that improve the velocity of the pianist. It is like 150 years old but still heavily used everyday by a lot of professional pianists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtuoso_Pianist_in_60_E...

Awesome, I'll definitely try it.

I've been paying for Piano Marvel for a few years, and there is tons of room for improvement in this space:

- Native, non-janky app. Ideally cross-platform.

- More inspiring music in lessons.

- Recommendation algorithm for what piece/lesson to practice next.

- More methods of measuring progress over time.

- Spaced repetition for sight reading, technique, scales, ear training, sections of known pieces.

- Splitting pieces automatically into overlapping sections to practice, RH, LH and hands together (whatever makes sense).

- Simple streaming/recording features for use with piano lessons over video chat (screen/video/audio mixed together to a single stream?).

- Show music theory concepts based on what you are playing, in the context of the current piece. E.g. what chord is being played, and its function. Possible continuations.

My setup is a Macbook + FP-30 + USB midi cable. Having the laptop standing on top of the piano makes keyboard and touch pad usage clunky, so navigation must be simple. Also uploading custom scores is a must for me.

This looks fascinating.

Im missing one thing though. Highlight of an app is that it can analyze play from MIDI but being an interested person it immediately pushes me toward “pick a device” which is immediate ehhhh area for myself.

I know there are many and there’s personal preferences etc. but I think that (since it’s an educational system) there should be kickstart process accessible, i.e. matrix of recommended devices and peripherals (size/price).

It would be awesome if the file format was open and anyone could add their own scores to the app...

I’m a beginner on piano/keyboard - been playing daily for a couple of years and I think this would be a great app for me to push myself. However, I mostly play kids songs when my kids are going to sleep and they are mostly Danish.

Would love to see a way to import sheets from my already purchased books.

I realize you earn money for the content but I would happily pay hundred dollars or more for the app if it could just import my existing sheets

I’m a father of two children, a nine and two year old, and none of us know how to play piano. I did play a woodwind for five years in and out of school, and did extracurricular music for many years - even from a young age.

Now, I’d like my son to learn piano as his first instrument. I imagine the theory and complexity of chords thrust on the pianist must be a good foundation for music in general - certainly I’m fine with my kids departures to any other instrument and mastery isn’t itself the goal.

Is this app the right tool? It doesn’t explicitly market to this segment. However, there are a number of other apps out there I’ve considered as well, including PianoMarvel mentioned elsewhere.

Surely, 1:1 lessons will be recommended - and I imagine they have their place - but I’d prefer to lean a bit harder into self-guided / app-guided and augment with a human tutor as necessary. My experience was that my tutored sessions were a bit wasteful (I wasn’t a disciplined student, and certainly wasted a lot of time and money).

My ideal setup is either an iMac or iPad and an electric piano.

I've definitely thought about how one goes about coding an intelligent agent that can identify what you're playing and the make accurate guesses about where in the piece you're playing.

The player could make mistakes as well, which means any intelligent algorithm would need to apply some degree of probabilistic calculations to find the most likely point.

Very often, when practising, you'd constantly repeat passages multiple times. And certain passages may also be exactly the same in different parts of the piece as well.

To me it sounds like a incredibly difficult problem to solve. Not sure if the recent AI advances change anything.

As an aside, thanks for making the app available for desktop Mac, even if it of course isn't explicitly designed for it. I think most people overestimate how many people have iPads around; I was never quite able to justify purchasing one given the price-how much I'll use it ratio.

iOS once touted itself as being honest. Now it doesn't show the price until you install the app?

About a week ago, I started practicing daily with an app called Melodics. This is after putting off starting for, well, my whole life.

Hot damn, I can play [a bit of?] piano now. I am genuinely shocked and couldn't be more excited.

Here's the thing: the app kind of flips the script on what I have always intuitively felt holds most musical teaching approaches back, which is the insistance that you want to play classical sheet music.

I very much do not want that! I want to be able to learn to be comfortable jumping to notes so that I can play contemporary, recognizable songs and eventually start to craft my own originals. I want to think in terms of bass lines, melodies and leads.

I think classical music is beautiful to hear in the abstract, but the idea that it's how or why you want to be able to play keyboard is actually super fatal, especially if you want to engage a young person.

What I'm finding as I work through exercises and practice on songs I either love or recognize is that my awful sense of timing is improving noticably every day because I know how Hey Ya! is supposed to feel, and so long as it feels wrong, my brain and my fingers have a target to work towards.

And let me just say that the gamification works. Sure, getting 90% or more will earn you three stars, but if you're like me, you want to see a wall of Perfect.

Anyhow, I don't dispute that when it comes to learning classical music from sheet, Hanon Pro probably raises the bar. But my immediate and visceral reaction to the screenshot was a hard nope.

I remember there was a strange PDF of learning piano floating around back in the day by a simple father. Was written in MS word .. did anyone ever try it?

nice, i was just day dreaming about a similar concept of collecting midi data to create fitness style visualization

what would be helpful for a beginner/intermediate is if i could practice my scales and chords, without first telling this app what i'm doing, then this app could track which scales / chords / etc i spent most time in and where my deficiencies/gaps are

Looks nice, but after downloading it, I was a bit disappointed. I mistakenly assumed that this would compare to something like Alfred's Adult Piano Courses [1], but it's much simpler than that.

Personally, I doubt that is wise to charge money for this. Sure, you put in some work, but the value is fairly low, and you'd probably only get payments from disappointed customers.

Edit: apparently the added value comes from using a MIDI device, which I don't have, so my comment might be a bit too negative. Most piano apps support microphone input, which is easier to set up and attracts a larger audience.

[1] https://www.alfred.com/alfreds-adult-piano-courses/b/

This is great. Can you please add Czerny?

How about an LLM that talks to you and can see the midi notes you played, fine tuned to the task of course. I think the teacher part of learning pretty much anything is super important because we’re social beings. Hearing “great job” is priceless when you really did your best.

Disappointed. The App Store tells me that the app will run on my IPad, an older model, just out of support and waits for me to click install before it tells me it wants iOS 17.

Pity, this would be a great use for an older model.

Is there a reason to hard wire this to iOS 17? Version is configurable in xCode and so I'm wondering what specifics bind it to 17.

No Vision Pro?

Yo, OP.

That's your third post on HN in two years. All posts are promo, and yet you made not a single comment.

If you are doing a "Show HN", it wouldn't hurt to engage with people a little. Otherwise it looks like a low effort drive-by ad and not much else.

There's an idea that an app can replace the boring and hard. For somethings that may be true but piano proficiency is sight reading and muscle memory. This is something you cannot speed run.

The purpose of Hanon is to teach aspiring pianists that real effort and grinding is required to be able to make that jump into the world of virtuoso and the more resistance a student puts up the greater the probability of them dropping out.

I'm just throwing my two cents as a someone trained in classical piano. Coding is also similar in that if you skip the tough and boring part of your journey it will not set you up with the solid fundamentals to tackle complicated problems.

Mastering a piece is not that different from mastering programming.

On this note, does anyone know some books in references to applied music theory? I'm a pretty advanced piano player, but a lot of more basic piano players can make up chords to play with with simple tunes that sound pretty good, most of those people seem to know a certain of rules that I don't know. And googling books about piano music on google books or the likes has not yielded any useful results.

Being able to track progress over time gives me the motivation to keep going..

Why is it iOS17+ only?