Early access — founding studios now open

Run your studio.
Show up for practice between lessons.

Cadence SM brings scheduling, invoices, attendance, and family messages together for independent music studios. Students get their teacher's practice plan—with a tuner, metronome, and timer—in the Practice Room.

Request early access See what's inside

Early access is invitation-led. Send us a short note and we'll set your studio up with you — there's no instant sign-up, and no demo to sit through.

The Cadence SM owner dashboard in the Glass UI: the Needs-you queue across the top, today's lessons and revenue below it, and the ten-entry sidebar on a softly tinted ground
One login replaces the scheduling spreadsheet the invoicing app the practice-log app the group-text thread
The difference

Studio management that goes beyond the office door. Into the Practice Room.

The calendar, invoices, and roster keep your studio running. Between lessons, students need a clear next step.

The Practice Room carries your teaching into that time: your plan, item by item, with a tuner, metronome, and timer close at hand. Logged practice activity, reflections, and recordings give you something specific to build on at the next lesson.

Cadence SM is built by studio owners, working teachers, and university music professors. We built the Practice Room because supporting students between lessons is part of our work, too.

The Practice Room

Studio software doesn't usually come with a tuner

This one does. The student's half of Cadence SM is the Practice Room: a chromatic tuner, a metronome with a rhythm trainer, and a guided session that walks the teacher's plan item by item against a daily goal — four tabs, Today · Practice · Music · Me. Students sign in with a PIN rather than an email address, it runs in any phone's browser, and it adds to the home screen like an app without anyone visiting an app store.

The student portal's chromatic tuner on the pastel ground: an arc gauge naming the note and how many cents sharp or flat, a which-way-to-turn cue, and tabs for auto-chromatic, target-note and drone modes

The tuner It listens, names the note, and says which way to turn the peg.

1
Three tuner modes Auto-chromatic, target-note practice, and a sustained drone to play scales over — octave-transposable, and instrument-aware for transposing instruments.
2
A rhythm trainer, not just a click Tempo ramps that walk a passage up to speed, and internal-pulse gap measures where the click goes silent and the visual beat keeps moving.
3
Signing in stops being the obstacle The studio hands out a portal link or a QR code the parent scans once, a guided step adds the Practice Room to the home screen, and the session lasts 30 days. A seven-year-old opens an icon, not a login form. A tablet dying mid-practice restores the session, checked items and all.
Tour the Practice Room →
The gamification screen: a student leaderboard beside a recognition board of award citations, with a badge catalog
Motivation

A motivation economy you actually control

The XP values, the level curve, what a streak day has to include, what the store stocks — all yours to set. And the platform enforces ceilings no studio configuration can lift, so grinding XP never pays. It's built honestly enough that you can tell parents how it works.

1
XP and levels on your rules You decide what each practice event is worth and what every level costs.
2
Streaks with standards Pick the categories a day must include before it counts — skip your scales, stall your streak. And when a kid is genuinely sick, a teacher grants a freeze so the streak doesn't die of the flu.
3
A rewards store Your studio stocks it; staff approve redemptions and the lock prevents double-spends. XP is currency you control.
4
A recognition wall Badges and citations in your studio's voice, with leaderboards you can leave off and any student can opt out of.
The feedback loop

Feedback that arrives before the next lesson

A student records a take in the portal and sends it. It lands in the staff review queue, the teacher's response goes back to the student's portal — and a push notification tells them it's there, so the reply doesn't wait for Tuesday. Answering it earns XP. The week between lessons stops being a story you have to take on faith.

Meanwhile every piece moves through a real lifecycle: assigned, learning, passed, performed — with the sheet music and a reference recording attached to the piece itself, so the student is never hunting for the part. Students watch "Performed!" land on their own timeline. Three years in, "what has she actually learned here?" has a list instead of a shrug.

A student's Music tab: pieces grouped into in-progress and passed as cards on the pastel ground, with sheet music and a reference performance linked on the piece in progress

Their repertoire, their record Sheet music and a reference performance attached to the piece they're working on.

Schedule › Calendar in the Glass UI: a week grid of lessons color-coded by teacher under the Today · Calendar · Attendance · Requests · Openings tab strip
And yes, it runs the business

The calendar and the invoice finally agree

Recurring solo and group blocks materialize into real lesson occurrences. Attendance — marked once — is what drives both the family's invoice and the teacher's pay run, so the two can't disagree. And when a family cancels inside your policy, the credit is issued automatically instead of negotiated by text. No end-of-month reconciliation weekend.

  • Recurring blocks with conflict detection across teachers, rooms and shared equipment
  • Invoicing that runs itself — credits, recurring discounts, late fees, refunds, and per-lesson billing for the families who need it
  • Attendance feeds both the family's invoice and the teacher's payroll run
  • Cancellation policies with a stated rule — you set the notice window, the emergency-pass allowance and when credits expire; a request inside the window auto-approves and issues the credit, and everything else routes to staff. The policy is the bad guy, applied identically to every family.
  • Parent self-serve rescheduling and swaps — capacity-locked slots, and the studio approves every trade
  • Stripe payments into the studio's own account — Cadence takes no percentage
  • Finance in one place — Billing Ops, Payroll, Expenses and Lending under a single sidebar entry
Growth

From a form on your website to a family on your calendar

Drop an embeddable lead form into the site you already have — your fields, your colors, your copy. Inquiries land on your leads board with the goals the family typed in themselves, and you get pinged on every one.

  • One embed, one script tag — CAPTCHA, a honeypot field and rate limiting do the spam work invisibly
  • A pipeline board, not an inbox — New, Contacted, Trial booked, Converted, Lost: every inquiry sits in a column with a next step
  • One-click conversion: a lead says yes, one action creates the whole family account — no re-typing
The Leads pipeline board: New, Contacted, Trial booked, Converted and Lost columns holding inquiry cards, with a Sign-up forms tab beside the board
The family portal Home in the Glass UI: a card per child with XP and streak, the family's upcoming lessons, and the floating five-tab pill Home · Schedule · Progress · Messages · Billing
For families

One login, every child — and a way in that isn't a password reset

Parents get a real portal, not a payment link: five tabs — Home, Schedule, Progress, Messages, Billing — with every child on one screen. Families don't sign themselves up; the studio sends an invitation, the parent fills in their own details, and the account is live. It runs in any phone's browser.

  • Families join by invitation — staff send an enrolment link, the parent enters their own contact details and adds their children, and the roster fills itself in instead of being retyped
  • The paperwork handles itself — contact details, a card or bank account on file, event signups, swaps and absence requests
  • Lesson times land in the calendar they already use — a subscribed feed keeps Apple, Google or Outlook current as the schedule changes
  • Both parents get told — notifications fan out to co-parents on the account, so "nobody told me" stops being a conversation
  • Per-scope consent for media, messaging and recordings — each one grantable and revocable on its own
  • "Can't make it" on any lesson previews what the studio's policy will do before the parent confirms
What families get →
Lesson transcription

The lesson, transcribed. The audio, never sent anywhere.

Record a lesson and Cadence SM transcribes it on servers we operate — a speech model running locally, never a third-party AI service. The audio is deleted the moment the job finishes, whether it succeeds or fails. What's left is a transcript your studio controls: who can read it, and how long it's kept.

1 Record
Lesson audio
2 Transcribe
Our servers · local speech model No third-party AI service
3 Keep what matters
Lesson summary Use in lesson notes
  • Shifting to fourth position — keep the thumb relaxed and drop the bow closer to the bridge
  • Second phrase at 72 bpm, then speed it up slowly to your goal tempo 90 bpm
  • Next week: we will work on measures 24–31, listen to the start of each note and make sure you create the note shape you want
Audio deleted when the job finishes · kept 30 days
Illustration of the flow. Transcripts and summaries live in Learning › Transcripts.
1
A summary you can use A summary is drafted from the transcript on our own infrastructure; the teacher reviews it and drops it into the lesson notes with one action.
2
Consent first A parent grants transcription consent for their student before any lesson audio is accepted. Without it, the upload is refused.
3
Fail-closed by design If the local worker isn't available, the feature refuses to run rather than sending audio to an outside service.
4
Retention you set Transcripts expire on your studio's schedule, and owners can delete one sooner.
Security that's structural

Built for studios that teach minors

Tenant isolation is enforced by the database itself — every table, every query, not by application code remembering to filter. Students sign in with PINs, not emails. Teacher–student messaging happens in per-student channels a parent can see, and the system has no mechanism for a private teacher–minor DM. Where lesson transcription is used, it is processed only on servers we operate — audio is never sent to a third-party AI service.

How we handle security →
Row-level security, per tenant Isolation the application code can't forget to apply

No teacher–minor DMs, by design Every conversation is visible to the family

Two-factor for staff accounts TOTP enrollment, and a password change ends every other session immediately

No trackers in the product No analytics scripts or ad pixels in the parent or student portals
Getting started

Three steps, and none of them are "watch a video"

Early access is invitation-led, so onboarding is a conversation rather than a sign-up form. Here is the whole of it.

1
You send a note Your studio, your instruments, roughly how many students, and what you're juggling today. A human reads it and replies.
2
We walk through it on your real schedule Not a demo account. Your teachers, your lesson times, your rates and your cancellation policy, so you find out whether it fits before you move anything.
3
We do the import together Students, families and repertoire from a CSV or spreadsheet. A dry-run preview classifies every row — will create, will skip, has an error — before a single record is written. Parent accounts and student PINs are generated for handout.
Early access

Founding studios, this is your entrance

We're onboarding a small group of studios and setting each one up personally — your real roster, your real rates. Founding studios lock in the founding rate for as long as their subscription stays active. A sentence or two about your studio is plenty to start.

Request early access

Early access is invitation-led, so this starts as an email to a person rather than a sign-up form. Tell us about your studio and we'll reply — usually within a day or two.

Email us about early access