I Built an App for the Venezuelan Cuatro

Six months ago, I picked up a cuatro — Venezuela's national instrument — for the first time.

As I started learning, I found myself needing a way to quickly write down and organize the chord charts of the songs I was practicing, in a format that felt intuitive to me. The available options were full-blown musician apps, and what I needed was far simpler. So I built my own solution, out of pure need, with the mind of a software engineer.

CamburPinton

CamburPinton is a web app for building musical chord charts for the Venezuelan cuatro. I built it over the last two weekends, with Claude as my engineering companion. The entire app runs on vanilla JS — no frameworks, no dependencies, just the fundamentals.

It lets you export your charts as PDF, but the underlying data model is JSON, which means I can evolve it programmatically in much more interesting ways down the road.

Building the announcement video with Remotion

For this launch, I also wanted to experiment with something new: I made the announcement video entirely with Remotion, a library that lets you build videos programmatically in React. That was a first for me, and a lot of fun.

What's next

The app is just getting started. I have ideas for evolving it: better export options, more chords, and maybe even audio features later on. A friend who plays the mandolin told me she would love the same tool adapted for her instrument, so who knows where this goes.

If you play the cuatro, or know someone who does, I'd love for you to try it.