Inside Arpèges: designing one-tap practice

The most consequential decision in Arpèges is a rule I set before I wrote a single line of UI: from a cold start, it should take one tap to be practicing. Not one tap to reach a menu, or a settings screen, or a "choose your level" wizard — one tap to the first rep, fretboard already lit with the shape. Everything else in the app is downstream of protecting that one tap. This note is the build log for why, and what it cost.

Key takeaways

Daily practice dies from friction long before it dies from bad content — the fix is to shorten the distance to the first rep, not to add features.

Arpèges holds itself to a one-tap rule: pick a preset, the fretboard lights the shape, go. The tagline is the spec.

Getting to one tap meant deleting choices — no config screen, no onboarding, presets instead of parameters.

I dogfood it as a guitarist first: if opening the app is heavier than picking up the guitar, the design has already failed.

Friction is what actually kills daily practice

I did not build Arpèges because arpeggios are hard to understand. They are not. An arpeggio is a chord taken apart — the notes of a G7 played one at a time instead of stacked. You can read that sentence once and know it forever. Knowing it does nothing for your hands.

What builds hands is reps, and reps come from showing up daily, and showing up daily is where every practice tool I have used quietly falls apart. The failure is almost never the content. It is the twelve small frictions between deciding to practice and actually practicing: unlock the phone, find the app, wait for it to load, dismiss the thing it wants to tell you about, remember which exercise you were on, reconfigure the tempo, pick a key, pick a position, tap start. By the time the metronome clicks I have spent more willpower navigating software than I have left for the guitar.

That is the real competitor. Not another app — the guitar sitting on its stand, which costs zero taps to start playing. If opening a practice tool is heavier than just picking up the instrument and noodling, the tool loses, and it deserves to.

So I stopped treating friction as a UX polish item and started treating it as the primary design constraint. Every screen, every option, every "wouldn't it be nice if" gets measured against one question: does this add a tap between the user and their first rep? If it does, it has to earn that tap loudly, and almost nothing does.

The tagline is the spec

The line I use to describe Arpèges is deliberately small: pick a preset, the fretboard lights the shape, go. That is not marketing shorthand written after the fact — it is the acceptance test. Three verbs, one tap of consequence in the middle of them.

Pick a preset. You land on a set of ready-made drills. You choose one.

The fretboard lights the shape. No mode to enter, no "generate" button — the shape is on the neck the instant you pick.

Go. You play. The app is already out of your way.

When a feature idea does not fit inside those three verbs, that is usually the signal that it belongs somewhere else, or nowhere. The tagline is short because the app is supposed to be short — the writing and the product are constrained by the same rule.

If you are building a practice tool of your own: write the one-sentence version of the core loop first, in verbs, and then refuse to ship anything that doesn't fit inside it. It is a surprisingly sharp knife for cutting scope.

What I gave up to protect the first tap

One tap sounds like a small target until you try to hit it, because most of the things software reaches for to feel "complete" are exactly the things that push the first rep further away. Getting to one tap was mostly an exercise in subtraction.

No configuration screen. The obvious way to build an arpeggio trainer is to expose the parameters: key, position, shape, tempo, direction, range. Each is a reasonable knob. Together they are a form you have to fill in before you can start — a wall between deciding to practice and practicing. I took the knobs off the front door. The cost is real: a power user cannot dial in an exact esoteric combination on their first visit. The benefit is that nobody stares at an empty form when what they wanted was to play.

No onboarding. There is no five-slide tour, no account gate, no "let's personalise your experience" interview. Onboarding is a tax you charge every new user precisely at the moment they have the least patience for your app and the most for their guitar. The presets are the onboarding — the fastest way to learn what Arpèges does is to tap one and see the neck light up.

Presets instead of parameters. This is the load-bearing trade. Instead of asking you to assemble a drill from raw settings, Arpèges hands you drills that are already assembled. A preset is a decision I made once so you do not have to make it every day. It is opinionated on purpose: the whole point of a preset is that someone already did the choosing.

None of these were free. Each one narrows what the tool can do on the first tap in exchange for making the first tap reachable at all. I think that is the right side of the trade for a practice tool specifically, because practice is a habit before it is a feature set, and habits are murdered by friction and fed by repetition.

Where the honesty is

Arpèges is a prototype, and I say that plainly because the whole Webeleon idea is an independent workshop with no company behind it — I would rather ship a small, honest tool and tell you where its edges are than dress a demo up as a platform.

The one-tap rule has edges. Optionality that I stripped from the front door still has to live somewhere for the people who genuinely need it, and balancing "fast for everyone" against "deep for the few" is an ongoing argument I have not finished having with myself. There is a version of this app that is faster to start and worse to grow into, and a version that is richer and slower to start, and Arpèges is my current guess at the line between them — not a settled answer. It runs on the web today, with iOS and Android the obvious next step. That is the honest status, and the status is the pitch.

The test I actually run

I do not evaluate Arpèges with analytics dashboards. I evaluate it as its first and most impatient user, every day, with a guitar already in my lap. The test is embarrassingly physical: guitar on, phone in the other hand, decide to run arpeggios — and count the taps and the seconds before I am actually playing. If that number creeps up, something I added is stealing practice time, and it comes back out.

That is the discipline dogfooding buys you. I am not guessing whether the app respects practice time; I am the one whose practice time it is spending or saving, and I feel every wasted tap directly. The features that survive in Arpèges are the ones that survived me reaching for the guitar instead — because that stand across the room, offering zero-tap noodling, is the honest benchmark this whole design is trying to beat.

If you drill arpeggios and want to feel what one-tap practice actually feels like in the hands, the fastest way to judge it is the same test I use: open it, pick a preset, and see whether you are playing before you have had time to change your mind.