What 530 guitarists and 1,227 recordings have told us
Frazer is a guitar coach that listens while you play and tells you what to work on next, right in your web browser. We opened it to our first few hundred guitarists a fortnight ago and have been building it in the open ever since. Here is where things stand: what players have done, what we have improved, and where we are headed.
Read the transcript
Hi there, Jonathan from Frazer, with a quick update for you. There is more detail below the video, but really this is just on where we are at.
We are two weeks on from first launching the beta. So far, over 500 guitarists have gone through and helped us iron out the bugs, as well as providing really useful recordings. We have had over 1,200 recordings made on the platform, which is helping us build the insights and provide better coaching feedback for everyone. And over the last two weeks, we have made 75 improvements and updates to the app and how it works.
We are very much in a process of rapidly getting on top of things and fixing them as they come up. It is going to take a while to sort everything, but we will keep moving forwards.
Looking at what is on the horizon: the mobile side is now a priority for us. Over the next seven days we hope to start showing people what the mobile version of the app is going to look like. It is more challenging working in a much smaller space, with some specific constraints, but we think it is going to be a really useful tool for everybody. We are also looking at how we build more songs into this. And around the end of September, roughly four weeks in, we will be looking to launch our Frazer Originals: a complete guitar learning journey. We will have more on that over the next week.
We are continuing to develop and evolve. If you would like to see how things are going and be part of it as we progress, head over to frazermusic.com, enter your email, and we can send you updates and invite you into our next tester group.
That is all for today. I will catch you again in about a week. Bye for now.
Two weeks in numbers
The beta is small and invitation-only for now, and it is already busy. In the first two weeks, 530 guitarists have visited Frazer and, between them, recorded 1,227 takes for it to listen to. Frazer has listened and answered 1,446 times. And we have shipped 75 improvements to the app, most of them straight from what players told us. We are moving quickly, and Frazer is getting better every week.
What we improved
The theme of the fortnight was clearing the things that stood between a player and simply playing. The biggest, for a coach whose whole job is to listen: recording is now reliable, on every step, so you can record a take, hear it back, and go again. Along the way we also caught a bug we had owned up to the week before, a song that would occasionally keep playing after you moved on. It is fixed, and the players who had hit it confirmed it is gone.
A sample of what else changed, most of it inside a week of being reported:
- You now hear the real guitar from the very first lesson, on a slider you control.
- Slowing a song down is one tap on every step, and Slow stays slow without falling apart.
- Chord diagrams are numbered by the fret you actually play, capo and all, and named consistently across the app.
- The tuner is fairer, and Frazer now works in Safari as well as Chrome.
What we are learning
Building in the open means saying what we get wrong, not only what we ship. Two lessons from the fortnight. First, the obvious cause is often not the cause: that song-that-wouldn't-stop took two wrong turns before we found it. Second, an honest coach has to know when to stay quiet. When Frazer cannot measure something confidently, it says so rather than guessing, and this week we stopped even asking players to rate the moments where Frazer chose not to judge. A verdict it did not give is not one to grade.
This is the whole idea behind Frazer: a coach that listens to your real playing and is honest about what it hears. That is worth more, we think, than a score that flatters you.
The roadmap ahead
Where we are headed next, nearest first:
- Guitar on your phone. The big one we are heads-down on: Frazer working properly on phones and tablets, so you are not tied to a desk. It is close, and we would rather get it right than rush it.
- Practice that keeps going. Drills that loop on their own, so you can settle into a chord change without stopping to press anything.
- More songs, and a journey through them. A clear path that carries you from your first chords through a whole song, and on to the next, so there is always an obvious next step rather than a wall of choices.
- More of the honest coaching. More of what Frazer can hear and tell you about, only ever where it can stand behind what it says.
We will keep publishing these notes every week: what we shipped, what players told us, what we learned, and what is coming next. If you would like them in your inbox, you can register below.
JonathanCo-founder, Frazer