One workshop, three tools — the new Webeleon

Webeleon used to be the name I did freelance web work under. It is now a one-person workshop that makes practice software for musicians. Same person, much narrower focus: instead of building whatever a client needed, I build the small tools I keep wishing existed while I practice guitar. There are three of them so far — Homechord, Arpèges, and Sight Reading Gym — and I use all three in a normal week. This post is the honest version of what changed and what each tool is actually for.

Key takeaways

Webeleon pivoted from a general web-artisan identity to a workshop that makes practice software, nothing else.

Three tools ship today: Homechord (compose chord progressions), Arpèges (drill arpeggios on guitar), and Sight Reading Gym (read fresh études daily).

It is an independent workshop — no company, no investors, no ads — and every tool is something I needed first and dogfood daily.

From web artisan to a music-tools workshop

The old positioning was broad on purpose: "I build websites." That is a fine way to pay bills, and it is also a bad way to build anything you care about, because the work is always someone else's spec. Over a couple of years the only side projects I actually finished were the little utilities I made for my own practice — a thing to sketch a chord progression and hear it, a thing to drill arpeggio shapes without setting up a metronome and a chart, a thing to force me to read notation instead of coasting on tab. Those got used every day. The client work got shipped and forgotten.

So I narrowed the whole identity down to the part that had traction. Webeleon is now a workshop, in the literal sense: a place where a few tools get built, tuned, and shipped by one person. The tagline I landed on is "Tools for musicians, built by one of them," and I mean it fairly literally — I am the first user of everything here, every day.

The important honest part: there is no company behind this. No legal entity, no investors, no growth targets, no ads, no engagement traps. That is not a disclaimer, it is the point. A one-person workshop with no one to answer to can keep tools small, keep them free while they are prototypes, and kill a feature that does not earn its place instead of shipping it because a roadmap promised it.

Three tools, one workshop

Here is what actually exists today, described at the level I can honestly stand behind — no vaporware, no invented features.

Homechord — compose

Homechord is a composition assistant for chord progressions. You sketch a progression, hear it played back instantly, and swap chords around with suggestions that fit what you already have. It is the tool I reach for when a progression is almost right and I want to try the alternative to that G7 without stopping to re-voice everything by hand. It runs on the web today; mobile is coming.

Who it is for: anyone writing songs or studying harmony who thinks faster by ear than by staring at a chart. If you have ever hummed a change you could not name, this is the tool that helps you find and keep it.

Arpèges — drill

Arpèges is a one-tap arpeggio trainer for guitar. You pick a preset, the fretboard lights up the shape, and you play. That is the entire loop, and the terseness is deliberate — the friction in arpeggio practice was never the playing, it was the setup: finding the shape, remembering the fingering, keeping time. Arpèges removes the setup so the only thing left is the reps. Web today, mobile coming.

Who it is for: guitarists who want their technique practice to start in the first five seconds instead of after five minutes of admin. The French name is a small piece of heritage I kept on purpose; product names do not get translated around here.

Sight Reading Gym — read

Sight Reading Gym is a daily sight-reading gym. It gives you fresh études every day, and your microphone listens while you play so the practice is closed-loop rather than you-grading-yourself. It is a desktop app — macOS and Windows — and it is a free prototype right now, which I say plainly because prototype status is information the reader deserves, not something to bury.

Who it is for: players who can noodle fluently but freeze when handed a stave. Reading is a muscle, and like any muscle it responds to short daily loads far better than to occasional heroics — which is the same argument I made in Building a Daily Practice Loop.

A week of dogfooding

The reason I trust these tools is that I cannot avoid them; they are load-bearing in my own practice. A representative week looks roughly like this.

Most mornings start in Sight Reading Gym because reading is the skill I am worst at and therefore the one that needs the un-negotiable slot. Ten minutes, the day's études, mic on. It is short enough that I have no excuse to skip it and closed-loop enough that I cannot lie to myself about the wrong notes.

Technique work goes to Arpèges, usually mid-session when my hands are warm but my patience for setup is gone. One tap, a shape lights up, I run it against the click. Because there is no chart to prepare, I do it more often — the tool lowered the activation energy, and the reps followed. That is the whole theory of the workshop in one interaction: remove the friction, keep the practice.

When I am actually writing rather than drilling, I am in Homechord. This is where the week's ideas get caught. I will have a fragment stuck in my head, sketch it, hear it back, and then spend a while swapping chords to test alternatives — a borrowed iv, a different turnaround — without losing the thread. Half of those sketches go nowhere. The ones that survive started as a change I could hear but not yet name.

None of this is a grand system. It is three small tools each doing one job, used where they fit, by the person who built them to fit exactly there. If a tool stops earning its slot in my own week, that is the strongest possible signal to go fix it — and being the first user means I get that signal immediately, for free, every day.

What is next

Two concrete things.

Mobile. Homechord and Arpèges are web-first today, and the honest state is "iOS and Android coming, not shipped." I would rather say that plainly than promise a date I cannot keep. When those builds are real, they will be real — not a teaser.

The waitlist promise. I am building a launch list, and I want to be exact about what subscribing costs you: one email per launch. When a tool ships, or a mobile build lands, or a prototype graduates, you get a single message about that one thing. No newsletter, no drip campaign, no "we miss you." One email when something ships, and nothing else. If that is a deal you would take, the last thing on this page is the sign-up.

If you are more interested in how this all gets built than in being pinged when it ships, the build logs live on this blog — the notes on how chords get rendered here are a fair sample of the level of detail, and more of the software pillar is where that kind of writing lands.

One piece of housekeeping: this post replaces the old "Hello, Webeleon" placeholder that used to sit at this address. That one existed only to prove the blog pipeline could load a real file. This is the real thing it was standing in for.

Want to know when a tool ships? Join the launch list — the promise is exactly one email per launch, nothing else. Join the waitlist.