
Show HN: Songcraft – Online Songwriting Platform and Guitar Tab Builder - gabergg
Hi HN!<p>I&#x27;m Gabe, the creator of Songcraft (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;songcraft.io&#x2F;home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;songcraft.io&#x2F;home</a>). I recently dove headfirst into songwriting, and I quickly grew frustrated with my process. I found songwriting difficult enough without having to wrangle a mess of different tools, and there&#x27;s no great solution to build chord sheets and tabs (unless you love pure text input).<p>So, I built Songcraft - an online songwriting platform and tab builder. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to jump from chords to lyrics to melodies. I added a chord progression generator and chord recommendation engine to ensure the ideas keep flowing. The integrated tuner, rhyming dictionary, metronome, and audio recorder allow you to stay focused without distraction.<p>A few months ago I shared the beta on Hacker News and got some incredibly helpful feedback and some amazing beta users. Since then, I&#x27;ve revamped the product and made a ton of improvements and additions. Today is launch day, and I wouldn&#x27;t be here without Hacker News!<p>I&#x27;d love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you may have. Drop a line here or at gabe@songcraft.io.
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JamCult
This is a huge unmet need in the market. I have over 300 guitar parts recorded
into iOS Music Memos, which does a decent job of automating the break out of
chords played but provides no way to build lyrics on top, note the tabs (which
is HUGE, because the next day I always get foggy on how to play what I
recorded and a month later have no idea...)

Excited to give this a red hot go!

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costcopizza
As frustrating as it is, you'll be amazed at how much you improve by learning
things purely by ear.

Plug in some good headphones and get after it.

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shams93
Wow nice work, I haven't seen anything quite as well laid out for typical
songwriter use. There are some good web apps for handling notation and
composition but I haven't found anything as nice as what you just created for
songwriters.

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gabergg
Thanks so much! Yeah, there are some great tools for composing, and some good
stuff for individual features (RhymeZone, Hookpad, etc). I was surprised that
I couldn't find anything quite in this category.

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pengo
This looks interesting and I'll try it out. I've been using a spreadsheet
successfully to store many of these elements: \- one row per bar \- columns
for bar number, chords, patch settings or drum patterns, lyrics, notes

Breaking lyrics strictly on the bar initially seems unintuitive, but in
practice it works well. Including pre-roll bars means the spreadsheet
corresponds exactly to my DAW. As I work through the arrangement and
production I'll tweak the spreadsheet and keep it up to date.

I also copy the spreadsheet to a new tab, rearrange and resize it so I can
print it out one one page (lyric-heavy tracks take two). There's a bit of
messy cutting and pasting in this, but I've got quite quick at it and it means
that while recording I can have all this information in front of me without
using any screen real estate. When I've finished the last of these printouts,
often with scribbled notes all over it, goes into a folder in case I need to
do a remix.

I look forward to giving Songcraft a go!

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gabergg
That's a super interesting process! I haven't heard of using spreadsheets to
track this kind of thing. It sounds like you're sort of building a
spreadsheet-based lead sheet.

Thanks for checking out Songcraft. Let me know if there are features it's
missing that would make it useful for your method!

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hodder
You are the man.

This is fantastic. Can't wait to see how this project progresses.

Some random suggestions:

Maybe I am missing something, but I don't see the ability to add chords
outside of the scale. Let's say I want to play an E major chord in an A Minor
progression due to a harmonic minor substitution. Is that possible with this
tool? It would be cool to be able to add common substitutions or completely
random chords too, perhaps in a separate box.

It might also be cool to see the roman numerals along with the chords in the
progressions or chord box, but that might be too cluttered.

Regardless, I am an instant fan of this. Great work.

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gabergg
You can add any chord you want! Just click anywhere on a chord line and enter
the chord you like (or click on an existing chord and type to change it). You
will also get recommended chords for that location in your song as part of the
autocomplete. The theory tools on the right are just meant as an alternative
way to add chords / progressions that sound great with your song, plus some
goodies like transposition.

I really do want a way to incorporate roman numerals, especially with the
progressions. I need to find a way to do it without cluttering the UI, but I
love the idea.

Thanks so much!

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hodder
Oh great! This is truly excellent work. I love the ability to toggle through
the chord voicings as well.

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maximp
This is super cool, and the number of tools you've packed into a single app
(metronome, tuner, recording, rhyming dictionary, chord prediction) is really
impressive. Great job aiming to be a one-stop shop for songwriters - best of
luck with the app! I'll definitely check it out the next time I'm writing a
song.

This is a small thing, but hearing chords/music sounds in your demo video (not
just the voice-over) would be great. Also... your demo really should be a
song.

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gabergg
Thanks for the kind words!

That's a great point about the demo. I'm hoping to put up a more polished demo
in the near future (with the help of more a talented video editor than I), and
I'll definitely include the audio.

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mr_tristan
I'd be curious to hear about the experience with customers in 6-12 months. It
seems like if you can tap into the "hobbyist" market, and keep them
interested, it could be a solid business.

I'm reminded by the Fender presentation at re:Invent this year
([https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-
studies/fender/](https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/fender/)).
Fender noticed that 45% of Fender players are new to the instrument, and most
spend more on lessons then the guitar itself, but 90% quit after a year. The
10% that stick with it will go on to purchase 8-10 guitars, typically from
their brand. So their whole strategy with apps and services is just to chisel
away at that 90% number.

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byproxy
I wish you could incorporate rhythm/bars on top of the lyrics along with the
chord symbols. I've been playing guitar since 2005, and I still find it
exceedingly difficult to play chords along with lyrics without some kind of
rhythmic reference, even if I know the song pretty well.

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gabergg
This is an incredibly important feature to me. It's coming, but I want to be
sure to get it right. It will also enable some other really useful features
like entire song play-through. Thanks for the feedback!

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byproxy
Yea, I can imagine how it'd be hard to implement. I guess you'd have to tie
the lyrics to rhythm, as well, and at that point you're pretty much
implementing sheet music features.

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gabergg
Exactly my thoughts! I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad direction to go, I
just want to make sure I do it the right way.

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ioseph
The editor looks fantastic!

Have you considered hosting tabs for sharing?

It would be great to see a replacement for UltimateGuitar who despite having
the largest collection of pop tabs engage in some extremely scummy business
practices

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ekzy
I made a small website because I was so annoyed at UG and co... I’ve kind of
stopped working on it though (a bit worried about monetising it as it seemed
to be a bit complicated industry in terms of intellectual property).

[https://www.lyrink.com/](https://www.lyrink.com/)

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ioseph
Oh wow this is exactly what I was planning to build myself. Great job!

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xster
How do you address the market of 30-something hobbyist with kids and jobs etc
who might have short spurs of creativity followed by very long inactive
periods. They might want to pay to use all the features and become good with
the tool for sporadic use but might be turned off to the idea of paying for
months of the account being dormant. A one time price for an online license
like Propellerhead Reason seems sensible.

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ry-n
This. And somewhat discouraged by the seemingly imaginary 44% discount on the
pricing page. Has 8.95/mo ever been the price? Is it going to be? Is this just
a permanent gimmick? Without any details or explanation it seems disingenuous.

I also can't find any info about exporting data for backups or what happens to
data if a subscription is paused for a period of time. Since it isn't called
out my default assumption is that data is trapped and lost respectively.

Generally looks like something I'd love to use but would be great to clarify
those points.

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gabergg
This is very helpful feedback, thank you. In a couple places, I mention that
the $4.95/mo rate (Launch discount) is for the first 3 months of your
subscription before it changes to $8.95/mo. I need to make this more
prominent, and I absolutely need to clarify the info on backups, plan-
switching, etc.

I'm working on a FAQ, but I'll also leave some clarification here:

Songcraft Basic is always free, and your existing songs will never be locked
or lost, even if you downgrade from Pro to Basic with more than 3 songs. You
can always export any song as plain text.

Comparison info on the plans can be found at
[https://songcraft.io/plans](https://songcraft.io/plans).

Please let me know if you have other questions!

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ChristianGeek
You really need to clarify the pricing quickly. As it is now, if I signed up
for the $4.95 offer and it got changed to $8.95 after three months I’d be
pissed.

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Mizza
This is great, I've got a bunch of hacky tools that do something similar-ish,
but not as polished as this! Good work

Feature request: export to MIDI.

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gabergg
MIDI support is on the roadmap! Export and import should both be feasible, as
is live MIDI input. Thanks so much for giving Songcraft a shot.

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asynchronous13
Several years ago I tried finding some reasonable software tools for music and
was not at all impressed with what I could find. Great that you decided to
make a better one!

A long time ago I ran across ABC music notation, typically associated with old
time or traditional music. I wonder if there could be an import filter that
works with ABC notation?

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gabergg
That's really interesting. When I was exploring implementing standard
notation, I also came across ABC notation. If/when I take on standard
notation, I think ABC notation would be very reasonable to implement for
import/export. Thanks for the feedback!

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asciimo
This is great. Another killer feature might be exporting songs as structured
documents suitable for git.

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gabergg
This would be really interesting to explore. You can already export a pure-
text version of your song (under Share), but it would be amazing to have a
more reliable document that included things like metadata as well. Thanks for
the thought!

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underdown
App seems extremely well thought out from first look, however, how do i
actually play a song back?

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gabergg
Entire song playback isn't live yet, but it's coming! It's a really important
feature to me, and I want to get it right. I could enable it in a very simple
form, but I think it will be much more useful if I can ship it with powerful
tempo/timing control.

Thanks for checking it out!

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this2shallPass
Thanks for making this! This was my first questions as well. Can you ship the
very simple form, and later ship the more robust version?

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gabergg
I actually might do that. It's been the top feature request of the day. I'll
look into it this week and see if I can ship something useful to tide us all
over until I can improve it.

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d0m
Congrats on the launch and on the UX/UI of the editor. There are so many great
features and yet it feels simple and not overwhelming at first.

~~~
gabergg
Thank you so much. That's the balance I'm aiming for, but there's still room
to improve!

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jfraser
Apart from how great this tool looks, I love that the example song is about
Drizzt and Cattie-brie. Those two deserve some ballads! :)

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gabergg
Hahah I was wondering if anyone would enjoy the reference. Thanks for checking
it out =}

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skraelingjar
I keep lyrics and tabs in txt files with a custom .editorconfig file for
color/highlighting, this is so much better, thank you!

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gabergg
I love hearing how everyone addresses this problem in their own way. I hope
you enjoy Songcraft, and would love any feedback you have!

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u03c6
Error 503 Maximum threads for service reached Maximum threads for service
reached

Guru Mediation: Details: cache-gru17121-GRU 1553106010 492684645

Varnish cache server

~~~
gabergg
Yikes! Hopefully the site will hold up to HN traffic. Was this on the landing
page? If you let me know where you saw the error, I can take a look. Thanks!

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schaefer
Why aren't applications like this native anymore? I'm personally experiencing
a major case of web-app burnout.

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rfrey
Is your question rhetorical? In case it's not:

1) Web applications make it easy to require monthly subscriptions, which many
people don't like but is great for companies

2) Web applications can be more easily monetized through ads

3) Web applications can be updated for everyone more easily than a bunch of
native installs, potentially reducing support costs

4) Web apps are a solution (not the only solution, but probably the easiest
solution) to cross-platform development

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andyfleming
5) Browser APIs/features and performance are continually improving, allowing
for rich experiences in web applications.

The advantages of web applications, especially from the viewpoint of the
developer/company, outweigh the advantages of native applications in more and
more cases.

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lhorie
Any plans for supporting standard notation?

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gabergg
That’s a great question. I held off on tackling standard notation because
there are some existing solutions out there for composing standard notation. I
decided to focus first on what seemed like an unmet need in the space.

That being said, I plan to bring in standard notation as an option after
adding timing control. I think Songcraft could do some amazing things with
conversion between tabs and standard notation, lead sheet generation, full
play throughs, etc. All that is feasible, and I’m excited to get to that
point!

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mhh__
Attention spans are short and the product talks, so the home page should be
some kind of working demo eventually

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iamsaitam
Out of curiosity, what are the chord progression suggestions based on?

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gabergg
The progressions from the generator are based on manipulations of common
patterns in scale degrees.

The chord recommendations in the editor are predicted from a recurrent neural
network.

There are lot of improvements that I'm excited to make in both of these
systems!

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revskill
How to play a song ? I don't see any play button there.

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gabergg
Entire song playback isn't live yet, but it's coming very soon! There have
been a ton of requests today, so I'll be prioritizing it.

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s_m
Great stuff. Congrats!

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gabergg
Thanks very much! I’d always love to hear any feedback after you get a chance
to check it out!

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lightedman
What sets this apart from TuxGuitar?

