Playsoloist is an independent studio that builds one thing: instrument-learning apps that tell you the truth. Seventeen of them — guitar to erhu, piano to tabla, trumpet to ear training — each built for its instrument rather than reskinned from the last one. We are small enough that the people who build the grading engine also read the support inbox. Write to us at nora@playsoloist.com and a person who works on the apps answers.
The manifesto
Every product decision runs through six rules. They are not aspirations; they describe what the apps already do.
- The grade is the truth. If you played 14 of 16 notes cleanly, the app says “Heard 14 of 16 notes” — never a rounded-up star rating, never applause you didn't earn. Flattery is pleasant and useless; a teacher who inflates your grade is stealing your practice time.
- “Not sure” is an honest answer. Quiet, noisy, or unstable audio is left ungraded instead of being turned into a confident mistake. An honest teacher would rather say “play that again” than mark you wrong on evidence they don't have.
- Your playing is nobody's data. Listening, transcription, and grading run entirely on-device. Our backend has no audio endpoints at all — your takes cannot leave your device through our software, because there is nowhere for them to go.
- Nothing watching you. Core practice needs no account. No ads, no trackers, no third-party analytics SDKs, in any app, ever. Each app's own privacy page carries its exact, versioned disclosure.
- Free means playable. Every app is genuinely usable without paying. Soloist Pro — US$9.99/month or US$59.99/year in the US, per app, with any trial eligibility decided and shown by the App Store — unlocks the full catalog. It never buys you a kinder grade.
- Real music, checked at the source. The graded repertoire is public-domain masterworks, verified against the composers' scores before it ships — bowings authored per piece for the strings, both hands note-for-note on the keys, primary sources checked for the Chinese and Indian repertoire.
How honest grading works
Described by behavior, because the behavior is the point:
Listen.
When you play, the app captures your take through the microphone and processes it entirely on your device. For touch instruments — the on-screen piano keyboard, the handpan pads — grading works by touch and needs no microphone at all.
Measure.
The engine locates each note you played — its pitch, its timing, its onset — and compares it against the score, note by note. Instruments get instrument-shaped ears: violin grading hears whether a note drifted sharp or flat; trumpet grading knows written C sounds concert B♭; tabla has no pitch to grade, so it classifies the strokes — Dha, Dhin, Na, Tin — and grades your timing against the taal.
Report.
You see which notes rang true, which didn’t, and what to loop next — drills built from your actual rough spots. Where the evidence is unclear, the take is left ungraded. What never happens: your audio being uploaded, your take being judged by guesswork, or your results being rounded up to keep you subscribed.
The catalog, and where it comes from
The piano catalog is 98 graded melody lessons + 392 play-along charts. The graded melodies are public-domain works — Für Elise to Clair de Lune — taken note-for-note from the composers' scores; the play-along charts are practice charts for playing along with music you already know. Every app’s catalog is its own: ukulele carries 62 lessons and 159 playable works across four tunings; trumpet carries 32 sequenced lessons and 111 rights-cleared melodies and original studies. Counts on this site come from the catalogs themselves — we don't advertise a number an app doesn't contain.
Privacy as policy
The privacy stance is editorial policy, not a settings toggle: audio on-device, core practice without an account, no ads, no trackers, no selling or sharing of personal data. The plain-English version lives at /privacy; each app’s own legal pages carry the exact versioned details.
Talk to us
Support, corrections, repertoire requests, or an honest complaint: nora@playsoloist.com. The support page covers the common fixes. If we’ve stated something on this site that an app doesn’t do, tell us — the copy gets corrected, not defended.