How Notalune began

I played piano for about seven years as a kid. Then life went elsewhere, and years later, when my own kids started playing, I sat back down at the piano myself.

The basics were harder than I remembered. I printed a chart of all the notes and kept it next to the music, especially for the high notes above the staff, and anything with sharps and flats. And I didn't want to play exercises. I wanted to play the music I actually liked, late in the evening, just for fun. Reading a harder page note by note was so slow it stopped being fun. At some point, I gave up.

What I wanted was simple: something that would look at the measure in front of me and tell me the notes, so I could check whether my guess was right without breaking the evening. I searched for an app like that. I couldn't find one. So I built it.

The first idea was labels locked to the notes in real time, floating as you hover the phone over the page. It turned out to be nearly impossible, and, honestly, a bad idea: lose the frame and you lose your place. Notalune became what it is now instead. Read the measure you're stuck on, in seconds. Or photograph a whole page, or import a PDF, and practice from the annotated page for a while. Then hide the labels, and play without them.

For me it worked. My reading came back faster than I expected, and along the way I finally understood things I must have slept through as a kid, why key signatures and scales matter. I've annotated my favorite songs, and I now play pieces I couldn't before. And because the app honestly isn't sure about every note, I stay alert and correct it, which, it turns out, is when I learn the most.

If it helps someone else in a similar place, or a completely different one. I'll be glad. The little wooden metronome is in there because I didn't have one at home and hated the ad-filled free ones. This one is free. Enjoy.

. David Christian Lichtag, daylight.studio, Brno