Terms of use

Last updated 17 October 2026

Guru Shishya is run by Phil Nicholls, Individual Entrepreneur (Georgia). By using the site you agree to these terms. Please read them with our privacy policy, which says what we do with your information.

What Guru Shishya is

Guru Shishya plays you phrases of Indian classical music, listens as you play or sing them back, and scores the notes and the timing. The score is worked out by a computer from the pitch of what it hears. It is a guide for your practice, not an exam or a judgement of your musicianship, and it can be wrong.

Your account

Some of the site works without an account. To make one you need an email address that is yours. Keep your password to yourself: you are responsible for what is done with your account, and an account is for one person.

You must be at least 13 to make an account. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian must agree to these terms and to any payment.

Plans and payment

Free use has limits, such as 10 scored attempts a day. The paid plans, Riyaz and Sadhana, are subscriptions, paid monthly or yearly, with the prices and features shown on the pricing page.

Our orders are handled by our online reseller Paddle.com, who is the merchant of record for all our orders. Paddle provides all customer service inquiries and handles returns.

A subscription renews at the end of each month or year until you cancel it. You can cancel at any time from Manage billing on your profile; you keep the plan until the end of the period you have paid for, and you are not charged again. If we change a price, we will tell you by email before it applies to you, and it applies only from your next renewal.

Refunds are explained on the refunds page.

Recordings and content

The phrases on the site are recorded by musicians who have allowed us to use them. They are for your own practice here: don't copy, download, record or share them, or try to get round the steps we take to stop that.

Your own recordings are used to score your attempt and are then deleted, except on a phrase whose page says that its recordings are kept to help us improve the scoring.

Teachers who upload phrases must own them or have permission to share them. By uploading a phrase, a teacher allows us to store it, play it to the students they share it with, score attempts against it and change its key or length for playback, for as long as it stays on the site. The teacher keeps every other right in it.

Using the site fairly

Don't use the site to break the law or to harm it or anyone else: no automated access or scraping, no attempts to get into accounts or parts of the site that aren't yours, no uploads you have no right to share, and nothing offensive in a display name or a profile picture. We may suspend or close an account that does, and if we close a paid account for this reason we don't refund it.

The service

We work to keep the site running and the scoring fair, and we keep improving both, so features change. We can't promise the site will always be available or free of mistakes. If we ever stop running Guru Shishya, we will tell subscribers by email and refund what they have paid for time they won't get.

Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability that the law doesn't allow to be limited, or your rights as a consumer. Otherwise we are not liable for losses that weren't foreseeable, or for business losses, and our total liability to you is limited to what you have paid us in the last 12 months.

Changes and the law

We may update these terms. If a change matters to you, we will tell you by email or on the site before it applies. These terms are governed by the law of Georgia, and its courts can hear any dispute, though as a consumer you may also be able to use the courts where you live.

Contact

Write to Phil Nicholls, Individual Entrepreneur (Georgia) at help@gurushishya.app.