Songcraft Beta – A songwriting tool and guitar tab builder | Hacker News Reader

Songcraft Beta – A songwriting tool and guitar tab builder

songcraft.io

141 pointsgabergg54 comments

I'm also thrilled to see more songwriting tools on the web! As an active songwriter, the area I need the most assistance with is lyrics. To that point:

- It'd be great if the rhymes panel was larger (or resizable). I use RhymersBlock on iOS which has a kinda neat way of color-coding rhymes within your lyric.

- Something I desperately need that no app has implemented is a way to build lyric "alternatives" on a phrase by phrase or line by line basis so that I can swap in an alternate lyrical treatment and see it in context. (Revision history would be a related and also probably very cool feature)

- I personally don't think I'd have much use for chord progression suggestions, but that's just me.

- I can't currently move a chord annotation while that annotation is selected. Have to click off of it to deselect before dragging works again.

- For chord annotations, it's often useful to be able to "split" the chord into the chord + bass (or root?) note especially for passing changes. You see this all the time in Beach Boys songs.

- Apple's Music Memos app has a bunch of audio analysis capabilities that I realize I use a bunch. They extract chords (which I don't use very often) but more importantly, they auto-detect a BPM from a recording which I use as the starting point when I'm ready to move from demo -> production.

I'm really excited about this app. Here's hoping it turns into the "Songwriter's notepad" I've always dreamed of!

This is really valuable, thanks for the thoughtful feedback!

- I'm considering making all panels resizeable, I think it would be really helpful. Also planning to build out the dictionary capabilities more.

- A friend of mine suggested the exact same thing re: lyric alternatives. I really like this idea.

- Are you on Safari? There's a bug with dragging selected chords on Safari. You also won't be able to play chords live. Chrome and Firefox should be good (I hope!)

- Really curious to explore some of the chord manipulation ideas as well as bringing a project from creative phase to production.

I am on Safari, so yeah, maybe that's it.

Thanks for the responses!

I missed Apple's Music Memos announcement, never heard of this and it looks awesome

It has a ton of rough edges (for instance, doesn't use the same media playback APIs as the rest of the system so playback dies if you turn off the screen) (also for instance, it routinely gets "stuck" looping through a tiny tiny maybe 100ms section of a song) but despite those it's become my go-to catalog for recording song sketches. Oh — I also use and rely on the rating and tagging features.

I used to use the Soundcloud app for this very early demo songwriting phase but that's not really what Soundcloud is about anymore.

Nice idea, and I’m happy to see more music-focused technology on the web!

Nitpick: the video refers to the site content as “tabs,” but I’d call it a chord chart instead. Tablature is specifically notation for individual notes on fretted instruments — e.g., play the second fret on the B string. I didn’t see any single-note stuff in your product, unless I missed it...?

All of that is to say: As a musician, I groaned when I heard you describe that as “tabs.” I expect other musicians would have a similar reaction (“um, this company doesn’t know what a tab is”), or at least they’d be confused due to expecting something else.

My own company Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/) does proper tabs and standard music notation, though I wouldn’t call it a competitor. We’re more about learning existing tunes than songwriting. Welcome to the wonderful world of web music software!

Thanks for the feedback - that's really helpful! I totally agree that chord chart is more accurate than tab at the moment. I'm working out the messaging still and trying to balance its current state with my vision for it (which will include single-note features)!

Why tabs? I much prefer guitar-spaces!

The challenge with guitar chord diagrams is they are almost invariably first position. For song writing inversions, bass lines and melody lines are important which is what tab is for. It would be good to create drag and drop tab creation tools on a 'stave' of strings.Looks good though, will use

As someone who picked up songwriting a few years back after having been a serious musician in my younger years, this is the kind of applications I love to see.

This is exactly how it should be. You found the right pain points. Now extend it with piano and you are getting really close to something I would pay for.

There are some small things like the use of the word "tabs" instead of chord charts but I love where this is heading.

I might write my next song in this. Or even try to add my older songs.

Oh and one more idea.

I would have a contextual panel on the right instead of the chords at hover that would give you more room to have a panel where you could experiment with different chord progressions substitutions etc. (ex. hear things played over with different chord substitutions.

This is a great idea. Experimentation and recommendation of chord progressions is my top feature priority at the moment. I think there could be some really interesting and useful stuff here. Thanks for sharing!

I really appreciate the feedback. What type of piano support would sell you on it? I'd love to hear how Songcraft works, or doesn't work, for your process if you give it a shot. Please feel free to reach out if you have thoughts, ideas, requests, etc.

Same as with guitar and ukulele. Inversions substitutions etc all based on the context of the song.

This is cool! Me and a friend have been working on https://chartcomposer.com/ which is specifically hooked up to Dropbox and uses the VSCode monaco-editor as a front end for the ChordPro syntax. Seems like there's interest in this space which is exciting.

http://github.com/elsigh/chartcomposer

This looks interesting in its simplicity. A few years ago I thought quite a lot about what a writing environment for lyrics might look like, so here are some free ideas to steal.

I’m on mobile right now where it doesn’t seem to work quite fully, so forgive me if this is how it already works on desktop - but I think it would be much more valuable if the rhyme search was automatically based on the words I write. Otherwise I will spend a lot of time copying/changing focus/pasting. It could even work like a code autocomplete feature, where it would suggest words or phrases that rhyme with nearby lines, in an overlay next to the cursor.

Another neat addition for crafting lyrics would be to add some way to analyze, visualize and/or constrain the rhythm/stress of the lyrics. It’s one of the main things you need to fit together when writing song lyrics. This could also help give more relevant suggestions for rhymes and synonyms that match a specific part of a rhythm.

Thanks so much for the feedback.

On desktop, you can hit a hotkey (Alt/Ctrl + w) to send the nearest word directly to the dictionary to the right, which is a time-saver. However, I think there's also something to be said for some sort of autocomplete, especially if it can take into account the context, previous lines, etc. I'm hoping to do a similar thing with chord recommendations as well.

I completely agree that the rhythm and stress of lyrics would be valuable to analyze. It's going to be one of my major takeaways from today's feedback - I'll just have to figure out a nice clean way to include it!

Just showing a dot above every syllable, and highlighting stressed syllables could be a great start, as you would be able to see patterns visually.

Another idea that came back to me now: rhyming words are good, but if you can get phrases as well it could be a great source of inspiration. See Pentametron[1] for a good example of how evocative rhyming non sequiturs can be.

1: https://twitter.com/pentametron/

I tried it, it’s exactly what I’m looking for. But I’m only on mobile (iPhone) and while it works, based on the comments from others it seems a lot of features are not in the mobile version.

Personally, I would only use a tool like this on my phone. And I’d want it to be a native app, not a web app (I predominantly have terrible reception).

I like he note pad, but I’d also like the ability to stash lines, verses, choruses, etc and then rearrange them very simply. This is effectively what I do with the standard notes app for iPhone. When it’s reasonaly cemented I write it up in a very similar notation you’re using and put it into google drive, with offline enabled.

I use the motive app, and mic, to record a demo. And then start polishing it via GarageBand.

All of which can and is done via mobile only.

I’ll follow where this development goes, it’s definitely a tool I’m looking for.

Thanks for checking it out! For the beta, I took mobile web to a pretty minimal state. I know it will be a huge use case for a lot of people, so I really want to have first-rate support on mobile. It helps a lot to hear the types of features you need. Please do keep up with development - I'd love to hear your thoughts as mobile support improves!

Great and really cool! A few tiny notes.

I had a moment where I deleted all the chords on one line (by hitting backspace repeatedly). When I got to the end, I hit it again thinking it would remove the line, and the whole page went blank.

I would also love a feature where I can share the song publicly at a URL. Is everything just persisted in the browser right now? I noticed there's no auth. At any rate, I wrote a song and annotated it in songcraft, but now I need to share it with the band's singer! This feature would be great.

Thanks again!

Looks really nice! A few years ago I started working on a vaguely similar tool because I was playing in a band and we needed a better way to collaborate on chord sheets.

I used CouchDB (and PouchDB) to get a nice real-time sync for editing the documents, and together with a good service worker setup it made the whole app work great offline, which was very useful in our rehearsing room's basement (it was actually inside of a nuclear shelter within a Stockholm subway station).

The other fun feature I made was a Web Audio synthesizer that would play the chords for very quickly checking the harmony. You can see a demo in this short video, unfortunately the app is not online anymore.

https://www.instagram.com/p/8oGx7HKukq/

I also had a feature where you could upload an MP3 for a song and then put in sync points with the chord sheet so you could hear the song while also seeing exactly which chord it's currently on...

The MP3 syncing is a super cool idea - did you analyze the MP3 at all to smooth syncing between sync points? Also love the little video, thanks for sharing! I think collaboration has huge value for any tool like this - it'll be one of my earlier priorities for Songcraft.

I was only doing linear interpolation between the manually set sync points. In my tests I would usually need to put a sync point per verse, or so.

The karaoke ball you see in the video was fun to make although I never got it quite perfect. The chord sheet is just a flexbox with wrapping and the ball is a CSS animation; the JavaScript only moves it from div to div once per measure.

"(it was actually inside of a nuclear shelter within a Stockholm subway station)"

This sounds pretty amazing!!

It was okay but basically you just enter the subway station and go through a locked heavy door to a slightly creepy corridor with a dozen small rooms serving as rehearsal spaces. The owner had barred the toilet door so on entering you would often see some metal drummer peeing in the metal sink...

Very cool. I've been working on a tab builder as a pet project. I've gotten frustrated finding tabs that are 95% correct, copying and pasting and then manually editing them. I know there are some tab builders out there, but ultimate guitar annoys the hell out of me so I figured it would be a good exercise to try out some new languages/frameworks that I haven't used. I wanted to be able to import a text tab, convert it to some kind of data structure that I could then manipulate easily.I might finish polishing it up some day, but it works for me as a bedroom guitarist

Here's a short screen recording I made. As of now it's still riddled with bugs, which I'm sure you'll spot a few in the video like the alignment bar hanging around when it's not supposed to.

https://uploadfiles.io/mk54d

That's really neat! It already looks so much better than typing it all out, which so many tools still have you do. I'm planning on integrating a similar tool into Songcraft, but not sure the exact form it'll take. Thanks for sharing :)

Thanks! I haven't touched the code in a while because it's gotten to the point where it's functional, albeit ugly and a little buggy on the UI side. I've been practicing (guitar) a lot more as a result because it's so easy to throw scales and chords together for some intense fretboard running and stretching.

> ultimate guitar annoys the hell out of me

I'd love to steal all the content back from them (I submitted tabs to alt.guitar.tab and OLGA long long ago, and have backups of the archive) and present it in a clean UI.

As you know, plain text files.

I'm curious though, is there a standard identifier authority for artists, albums, and songs that one could use to normalize such content?

>I'm curious though, is there a standard identifier authority for artists, albums, and songs that one could use to normalize such content?

Here's what UG has to say about it. https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/ug_news/are_ug_tabs_leg...

Sounds like a load of crap to me. They probably have a small payment stream just to play the "see, we're trying to comply!" card. Otherwise, I highly doubt they fork over any money unless a lawsuit is thrown their way, even then it seems like they just "block" the tabs as that page describes. There are so many artists on there who probably don't even know people have created tabs for their music. I made my tool for my own personal use and mainly because I wanted to try out Django and Postgres on the backend, so that was never a real consideration for me. I might throw the builder portion of it out there for public use when I wrap it up, but there won't be any saving/sharing of tabs. Just export the tab to a PDF or a raw JSON file which can then be re-imported and edited, I suppose.

I see a lot of folks mention guitar tab pro files with a few open source editors[1], but little mention of where folks are getting free pro files. What do you use and where do you get your tabs? I'm willing to pay if it's worth it.

[1] https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/1386/is-there-any-...

Looks interesting.

Personally, a killer feature for me would be to position lyrics up above a staff and be able to show alignment between syllable length/emphasis and harmonic rhythm/percussion. Having the ability to suggest synonyms for words that don't rhyme or fit the rhythmic structure of the music would be pretty awesome too.

That's a really interesting idea, thanks for sharing. I've heard some similar things from a person I was talking to who writes a lot of rap and poetry. I'm excited to explore that space a bit!

Looks promising! I like that it's a little bit more geared towards lyrical integration, as opposed to something like Hookpad, which focuses more on melodic note entry:

https://www.hooktheory.com/hookpad/app

Yeah, I think Hookpad does some really cool things (and they have a neat prediction API), but I couldn't find anything that really fits my songwriting process as a whole. Thanks for checking it out :)

This is really great! I used to work at another music startup where we did something similar. I've been using OnSong (mobile app) to organize my songs for live performances, but I love that this is focused on creation. Excited to try it out.

Thank you! OnSong looks cool - I hadn't heard of it. I'd love to make Songcraft performance-ready as well, I think it would be a very natural feature. Looking forward to your feedback!

I signed up and will be looking at it tomorrow evening. I'm an active songwriter and have a couple of fresh songs in process right now, so it'll be interesting to see how well it works for me!

Thanks so much for checking it out. Excited to hear your thoughts!

Tried to add my first chord Bmaj7(no3) and it doesn't seem like the app recognizes it (can't play the chord or change the key of the song).

Thanks for trying it! There's no support for Maj7(no3) chords at the moment. It's a less common pattern, but would be easy to add support! At the moment, I'm using tonal for chord recognition under the hood, so these are the chord types that it can recognize: https://github.com/danigb/tonal/blob/master/packages/diction...

Thanks for the quick reply and helpful explanation.

This is totally awesome. I've been waiting for serious musical tools to find their way online, and this seems like a great start.

Thank you so much! I was really surprised I couldn't find a thing like this anywhere. I've got so many ideas - looking forward to turning it into an even more serious tool :)

This is very well done! I'll definitely be making use of this!

Once I get a chance to try it I'll happily provide what feedback I can.

Thanks so much! I appreciate any and all feedback :)

I should note that everything should work fine on updated Chrome and Firefox, but no guarantees on other browsers!

How does the suggested chords feature work?

At the moment, I suggest common chords in the same key as the rest of the song. I'm working on a recommendation system that will take more into account the music theory of progressions as well as common existing patterns found in different styles of music. Super excited to have a decent system for that, as it's one of the main things that I personally want to use in my songwriting.

Sounds cool, open source by any chance?

Right now it's closed, but I plan to open source at least some of the cooler pieces of it :) Likely some of the recommendation and audio stuff. Haven't had much time to think about that yet though!

Just a heads up, while having a basic chord progression suggestion tool isn't a bad thing, there are already VST tools that do this and integrate with a DAW, so you can hear the different progressions and export midi to a track which can then be used with any instrument. They also support various timings, different modes, inversions, etc. Probably not a good idea to spend too much time on this.

I suspect a decent approximation would be something like a 3-step Markov chain based on all 12 transpositions of a bunch of genre songs?

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