Uberchord: the personal guitar training app

Uberchord - Trainer Single Mode


Learning guitar is a daunting project. Especially when you don’t have a guitar teacher next to you checking your fingerings and chords, which is actually the case most of the time you’re playing. Uberchord has developed an amazing app with a chord recognizer that gives you real-time feedback on your playing no matter your level. We’ve asked some question to Simon Barkow-Oesterreicher, cofounder of Uberchord and a great fan of Meludia.

How did you start Uberchord?

We were frustrated with the way musical instruments are taught. It isn’t motivating, it’s inefficient and in most cases comes with no real understanding of music. We were searching for solutions that use the capabilities of smartphones and tablets to make the process better and more fun. For example, music games like Rockband and Guitar Hero show how motivating this experience can be but unfortunately they don’t teach music. Good teachers, on the other hand, take their students to a level to where they can not only reproduce existing songs on their instrument, but make music themselves. We set out to combine these two goals into an interactive mobile app.

What is Uberchord?

We want to make learning music more accessible with the help of technology. Our first app combines polyphonic pitch recognition (read: chord recognition) with adaptive learning in a slick mobile app to create a unique way to learn to play the guitar: Uberchord does not only tell you how to play a particular chord but also corrects you when you make a mistake, analyzes your skill level for everything you do and slowly increases the difficulty of the lessons as you improve.

What does it change in guitar education?

Having constant visual feedback available during the practice sessions at home changes the whole game. The learner no longer has to guess if he plays his chords and riffs correctly until he sees his teacher next week (if he has a teacher at all). Furthermore, we motivate the user with gamification, reminders, and daily goals.

What are your plans for the future?

Our aim is to re-invent how we learn musical instruments. Instead of just acquiring finger skills, learning how music works will help the users to speed up their learning process significantly. We also know that keeping up motivation is hard. We will integrate popular songs into our learning paths soon to make learning with Uberchord even more rewarding and fun.

The ultimate vision is someone picking up an instrument and use Uberchord until he’s improvising with a band on stage. A long shot, we know and probably delusional. Never mind, you gotta try 😉

As a Uberchord and Meludia user, how do you use these two apps in your learning process?

Most beginners of guitar struggle with learning their first chords. With the specialised chord exercises in Meludia they can get a feeling for chords in general while with Uberchord they learn the chord names and how to get them on the fretboard.