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I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month. I just thought there
by nspeller 2y ago
I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month.
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
https://www.lightnote.co/ https://www.lightnote.co/
- DoingSomeThings 2y agoFantastic landing page! Related thought - Is there a good way to search for projects like this? I know there are hundreds of these passion projects that never show up in google. Ex) This year I want to get better at playing piano. Reddit and google bring up a few consistent big name links. I'd love to support a well-produced course by a creator like this, but have no idea how to find it.
- cpursley 2y agoThis is really cool, wishing you the best of luck!
- Rendello 2y agoIt's been paying his rent for 8 years, I think fortune's on his side ;) The landing page got me too and I signed up
- catchmeifyoucan 2y agoreally cool! Can't wait to use this for my next musical learnings
- jjcm 2y agoI wish I had this when I was learning. This is amazing - great work on all the interactive demos!
- krzys 2y agoIt's awesome! It's so accessible, from now on I'm gonna send it to my non-musician friends whenever they show any interest in music.
- dabernathy89 2y agoCan this be gifted? Or will the purchase be tied to my email only?
- nspeller 2y agoI have not implemented this (yet). But every year around the holidays a bunch of folks request this. I tell them to buy the course, and then email me who they'd like to gift it to. Then I just manually create a new account and send an email saying so-and-so bought you this course with the login! nathan [at] lightnote.co
- JoshTriplett 2y ago> I have not implemented this (yet). > But every year around the holidays a bunch of folks request this. I tell them to buy the course, and then email me who they'd like to gift it to. You could add an MVP by having a "Gift a subscription" link that leads to a page saying "buy a subscription and then click this link to email me who you want to gift it to". That at least means you don't have to keep answering the question for people.
- FredPret 2y ago+1 for this feature
- ipaddr 2y agoAfter seeing your landing page I finally understand what a landing page should be.
- butshouldyou 2y agoI clicked through to the website after your comment. Landing pages are too often a wall of text, this one is a great example of how they can be done correctly.
- normie3000 2y agoFor me if shows: > Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). I'm on phone so can't check the error right now.
- e40 2y agoWhat browser and phone? Works on iOS and safari for me.
- nspeller 2y agoThank you! Over the years I have run a few A/B tests on the landing page. I tried some variations I thought MUST improve the conversion rate. However, this one, which is basically the original one, is still the best performer. If it ain't broke.
- saltcod 2y agoAgreed. Fantastic landing page.
- pico303 2y agoAnother plus for your landing page. It’s amazing how many landing pages vomit features the developer is excited about but never explain why I need their product.
- swiftcoder 2y agoYeah, this is one of the most compelling landing pages I've ever clicked on. Actually dropping me straight into the first lesson before I hit the paywall is very effective.
- abtinf 2y ago> I built…over a winter break This site is extremely well done. You built it, and all of its content, in a couple weeks? That’s amazing.
- nspeller 2y agoAh, yeah that is misleading. Let me clarify. The landing page is what I built over the winter break, including those first 7 lessons. Since then that page has remained largely unchanged. However, when it started getting a lot of traffic I added a pre-order form for a full course. THAT took me 6 months to code up all the additional lessons. Building all the interactive pieces (drum synths for rhythm lessons, an ear training game for intervals, a virtual guitar, etc.) was really fun but a lot of work. For example, the interactive guitar uses samples I recorded note-by-note from my acoustic guitar in my bedroom. Afterwards I couldn't look at it for months. And then over the years I've added more. So not quite an overnight success. Thank you for the kind words though!
- mikeyhew 2y agoWould love it if you could go into more detail about those two weeks. Had you already played around with tone.js beforehand? Did you have an idea or a draft written up for that initial lesson so you knew what was gonna be in it, and was it your initial vision to have a picture of each waveform accompanied by the sound, and buttons for each note in the scale? Did you have to change part of your design (even small details) when you discovered that it was hard to build something a certain way and that another way would be easier?
- vthommeret 2y agoI'm curious where you get your traffic from / if it's fairly consistent and if you have any marketing costs. Thanks!
- jcheng 2y agoI've been wanting this explainer my entire life!
- jmacd 2y agoYou site is insane! I clicked the keyboard as a lark and it totally got me intrigued about the entire rest of the site. I was smiling as I read the explainations.
- webprofusion 2y agoLove it, and I very much understand the level of work that went into making it (beyond your initial landing page). Good way to test the water then build the full product.
- joshdavham 2y agoI really like the overall design of the site! I'll probably inspire from it for some of my future projects.
- aanet 2y agoFantastic site! Well done, beautifully executed, and very inviting. I play the guitar (and keys) -- but I'm a bit light on the theory part of it -- and this looks very much like I could use a refresher. Kudos!
- kmoser 2y agoI'm impressed! Every couple of years I come across a different music theory website and I try to follow along, but inevitably after a few sentences I'm completely lost and the rest becomes incomprehensible. I got really far along in yours, which was great, until I got to 6 (Keys): "When a song says that it is in the key of C Major or D Minor this is simply telling you which of the 12 notes are used in this song." You then give examples of Major and Minor keys, each of which contains seven notes. This threw me for a loop. Are you saying every song consists of exactly seven notes (some repeated, obviously) from only one key? Or are you saying every song uses at least some notes from a key? Also, don't some songs switch keys in the middle? Not looking for answers here, just wanted to point out where I got stuck so maybe you can add some clarity to that section.
- ludston 2y agoYou have to understand that music theory is not a set of rules to follow, its a set of ideas that sound good to western ears and therefore are very commonly found in most music. Not every song, but much western music, especially pop music and nursary rhymes, will stick to the same major or minor scale of notes for the whole song. Going outside of this scale is quite normal too and changing the scale/key multiple times in a song is also quite common. The point of learning music theory is to give you a toolbox so that you can both recognise patterns in music you are listening to, as well as give you some ideas of what sounds good when you compose or improvise. This is quite similar to mathematics where in school we dogmatically teach students how to do arithmetic in the base-10 euclidean system, because having deep fluency in one system is more useful than having a little understanding of many systems.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kmoser 2y agoI certainly understand that in any system (not just music), some rules can be broken at certain times for various reasons (safety, aesthetics, etc.). To combine what you're saying with what I was saying, I would like to see, at least in this case, a better explanation of what exceptions are commonly made to these rules (e.g. using non-standard chords) and when they are made (e.g. in music from region XYZ). In fact, I'd argue that such explanations are critical even when you're learning any kind of theory since it tells you when the theory breaks down, whether that's because it simply doesn't fit the task, because people like to get creative, etc.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoI sent you an email in Feb 2023 about a video that wouldn't load. I'm not sure whether you saw it, as I didn't see a reply: One of the embedded videos on the progressions page is no longer available on YouTube. I'm not sure whether you're still maintaining lightnote, but thought I'd let you know anyway :)
- alaithea 2y agoThis is great. I started creating something like this almost twenty years ago, but didn't finish. You're living my dream. :) Kudos to you!
- user7878 2y agoCan you add keyboard shortcut handler? like when I press 1 it can play the 1st button mentioned in screen?
- aecorredor 2y agoI’m a customer and it’s awesome. I think we’ve even exchanged emails about some questions I’ve had. When I paid for the premium version I thought it was super good for what I was getting. You must be getting a ton of traffic for it to still be paying rent after 8 years! Congrats!
- cdosborn 2y agoCool project. I have a dream to make something like this for drawing spatially. Came to the parent to share my current project which spell checks websites. It found a few small typos on your site. https://www.spl.ing/report-card?website=www.lightnote.co&uuid=17aa3407-d543-4390-acdd-50ca8130d8b9 https://www.spl.ing/report-card?website=www.lightnote.co&uui...
- ck1992 2y agoHave you heard of carapace? Its a tool to create spatial lines for drawing
- cdosborn 2y agoTaking a look. For the past two years I've been thinking about drawing. Why it's difficult, how its possible for people like Kim Jung Gi to draw from their imagination. My theory is that it's a learned thing (as opposed to innate ability), but that it's not taught from primitives well. For example, rotating a cube is something that you cannot really find an explanation for. I think the actual difficulty in drawing (representational-ly) boils down to preserving the identity of objects through rotation. This difficulty is preserved in the presence of perspective or not (orthographic projection).
- throwthrow4567 2y agoForget it. There's very little that can be taught about drawing. Drawing from model is about being the kind of character that enjoys spending hours tweaking at tiny details and measuring measuring measuring. Anybody willing to sit 3 hours in front of the model every day can learn it, if he understands that he must measure. Drawing from imagination like Kim Jung Gi on the other hand is about doing that every day most of the day since you were a little kid, and you probably need an innate ability to boot (and that might be some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder / autism...).
- cdosborn 2y agoYeah, I'm not referring to drawing which is copying. > There's very little that can be taught about drawing. While drawing from the imagination is largely about using the intuition. The intuition can be trained just like the more analytical side of the brain. I can teach you a few properties of rotation/space, etc, and then give you the right exercises, and then you won't need to use construction to draw. KJG does have some innate ability, and he was clearly obsessed, but it's not actually the bulk of his method. He has a video about drawing scissors. He can articulate nearly everything he is drawing, specifically the function which guides the design. There are others who can draw like him. Look up Tom Fox.
- scary-size 2y agoAwesome, do plan on having this translated in different languages? I'd buy a German version.
- perebaj 2y agoaweasome!
- 0xEF 2y agoHey! My son used your site! So, thanks for that. This was a couple of years ago that a music teacher recommended it to him to help boost his progress. I think you continue to sell because your prices are very good for what you are offering, and the site is designed in a way that allows anyone to pick up on things fairly quickly.
- dotancohen 2y agoThis is terrific! On Firefox Android, in step four, I managed to get into a situation where one of the notes kept playing. It occurred when pressing too many keys on the keyboard demonstrating the chromatic scale. Pressing each key again for not "unstuck" it. And if I'm already providing feedback, then a nice improvement for the end of step two would be an option to hear the two notes of the displayed waves, together.
- vitaly-pavlenko 2y agoBtw I'm making an interactive music theory course right now. I'm 2 months of polishing away from being HN-publishable, but I decided I'd share at least in comments. https://rawl.rocks https://rawl.rocks
- Jean-Papoulos 2y agoThank you for mentioning the effect of Paypal, that's very interesting. Did you add it as a full-on alternative to Stripe, or just activate the payment method in Stripe ?
- joeframbach 2y agoFirefox Android here, the page zooms in and out when I double tap on a keyboard.
- bennesvig 2y agoI've wanted to learn Music Theory for about a decade (only learned guitar tabs as a teen and to read sheet music as an adult). Love what you made and just got the premium course.
- rtchau 2y agoI love Lightnote! I'm trying to get my kids into it as well. Awesome work.
- lnt129 2y agoWhen I was learning guitar a few years ago, I came across your website and really loved it. But after that, I forgot about it. Your website is great, very easy to undersand, and the UI is also great.
- ensemblehq 2y agoWow. I’m very impressed by the site and even more so by how you did it over a winter break. It’s definitely very intuitive and I’ve been looking for a way to learn music theory as an adult. Thank you!
- gcj 2y agoThis makes me want to learn music even though I'm not a musician
- DocSavage 2y agoVery nice. I'd suggest adding another deluxe bundle for non-Guitarists without the guitar theory. I'd pay extra for the ear training + the base package.
- CosmosSeb 2y agoI've been building something in a similar space over at https://muted.io/ https://muted.io/. It's been just about paying out my rent and food in the past year. I've been pretty impressed at Lightnote and how its executed and actually tried to reach out to the creator a couple of times for potential collaborations. Not sure if my messages made it through.