Cifra Club
Micro-lessons
A short-form video format that brings Cifra Club's teaching to Instagram and TikTok: an iconic passage played in detail, with the tablature, chords or rhythm on screen.
Cifra Club is one of the largest music-teaching references in the world by audience: over 6 million subscribers on YouTube and a brand people associate with learning to play.
In 2025, the challenge landed on me: take that teaching capability to social media and reinforce this identity of a brand that teaches.
As a product designer, the work here was less about screens and more about translating Cifra Club into a completely different medium.
Short-form social video isn't where people go to learn.
People get hit in seconds, mid-feed, without looking for a lesson. The initial idea was a "chord gameplay," someone playing. In the fast cut of Instagram and TikTok, I didn't think that held up on its own.
The challenge was to make something that was genuinely a lesson, showing precisely how to play a passage, but that worked in seconds, without narration, and pulled people into the ecosystem without pretending to be a deep course.
The lesson happens in the playing. An instructor records a short, memorable passage, a solo, a riff, the part people recognize. Without showing their face and without speaking, taking care to show in detail how it's played, and on screen come the tablature, the chords or the rhythm.
With no narration and no course depth, it's still a lesson: it shows the how and hands over what you need to reproduce it.
The components came from the product
For the video screen, I reused the tablature, chord and rhythm components from Cifra Club's apps-and-site design system, adapted to the new environment.
That creates brand consistency: whoever sees the video recognizes Cifra Club and, on reaching the product, lands on familiar ground.
Framing and photography
I also defined the framing, how much of the screen goes to the playing versus the notation, which elements appear and how they animate in sync with the music. Camera movement and animation timing follow the passage.
And I directed the format's photography, the details that hold the quality up:
- the player's clothing;
- the instruments against the background palette;
- the image and sound capture.
The bet is that the very high technical level, beautiful image and audio over an always-iconic passage, is what hooks people mid-feed.
The videos are published frequently on Cifra Club's Instagram and TikTok. The primary function is reach and the secondary is conversion, so the main metric lives in reach: on average 100 thousand people a day, with peaks of 2 to 3 million views on specific videos.
More than the number, the format reinforces Cifra Club's image as a brand that teaches people to play and works as top of funnel into the ecosystem, from the Instagram profile to the site and YouTube.
And the result belongs to the team: the capture and large-scale execution from the audiovisual and social media crew are what hold the quality up video after video, every day, and make the format work.
Credits
- PO and originator
- Sam Vignoli
- Product design and cinematography
- Josue Macedo
- Cinematography
- Letícia Souza, Bruna Fagundes
- Content management
- Mariana Santos
- Camera
- Bruna Fagundes
- Sound
- Emanuel Fernandes
Tools
Figma · After Effects