Song-specific guitar tunings

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1

I can’t figure out a way to input a custom guitar tuning tied to the song instead of the tuning-library built into the app. I would love to be able to experiment with song-specific tunings. A great example is the Johnny Flynn song Wayne Rooney, which is

E-E-B-E-G#-e

That’s right, two low E’s! Handling this as a 5-string guitar be okay - no need to handle the confusing case of “which low E do you mean?”. Being able to list out the strings manually opens the door to 7 and 8 string guitars too, which would be neat.

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Yeah, this is something that’s been on our list for a super long time. Every time I’ve tried to tackle it, a nasty problem kept popping up.

Originally, the design allowed for full flexibility. That’s why we are able to support as many stringed instruments and tunings right now.

When we introduced full chord detection, it revealed a terrible problem with the flexible design that led to a massive slow-down. That forced us to make a technical change that caused us to fully pre-calculate some stuff for all the chords in advance. That decision had its pros and cons, and one of the cons is that exposing flexibility to the user is a really big project.

Even worse, though, is that it might require a breaking change to Capo’s user interface. Since Capo’s been around for nearly 14 years, breaking the interface can have a negative impact on a lot of people.

We’ve had to break the UI a couple of times now, and the experience isn’t fun. So now I try to be extra careful with this stuff, and it makes things harder than I’d like. Still, custom tunings (and chord shapes!) is one of many pet projects that I’d like to tackle eventually.

So, uh, keep telling your friends how awesome Capo is! Get as many of them to subscribe as possible, and maybe one day I can afford to hire help again. :sweat_smile:

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So, uh, keep telling your friends how awesome Capo is!

I literally cannot do that, it is impossible! I can tell them how great CapoApp is, but it is not possible to tell anyone to go get Capo. That’s like naming a child Someone, and then trying to get him a date by telling all the girls “Someone is so cool, you should go on a date with him”. They will be confused, and Someone will not get the date!

It doesn’t matter how great the child’s talents are or how hard the child works, they will not be able to participate in social contexts until there is a sound people can make which uniquely signifies that person. It’s like a computer on a network without an IP address - it literally cannot be on the network, it doesn’t matter if the wires are there, it needs to have a name!

Capo’s been around for nearly 14 years … breaking the interface can have a negative impact on a lot of people … maybe one day I can afford to hire help again

The tuning thing isn’t a huge deal, but if you have so many users that you can’t change things, but also not enough revenue to be able to afford to make changes, then you are deeply stuck! I am just a user of your software, but I am also a small-time software entrepreneur.

I founded and run these (Links removed because Discourse says I can only put 2 links in)

And I have helped the founders of these with similar problems to yours

You have such a great product, and you have a great design aesthetic (I wish I had that too!). But your branding strategy and product management strategy are terrible. You have done the hard parts magnificently, but the easy parts are so bad that you can’t capitalize on the great parts. Can we do a phonecall or webchat sometime? No money involved, I just really like your product and I think it would be so easy for you to make so much more money and then the product could be better and I could have the tuning thing that I want :slight_smile:

I don’t want to dox my email on this forum, I’ll send a support message. I’m sure you’re busy, but I hope we can chat at least for a bit!