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Show HN: Songcraft – Online Songwriting Platform and Guitar Tab Builder

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21–30 of 64 posts

Re: Show HN: Songcraft – Online Songwriting Platform and Guitar Tab Builder

#21
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!

Re: Show HN: Songcraft – Online Songwriting Platform and Guitar Tab Builder

#22
post #8

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

I think the native platform is well covered already. Musescore and Tux Guitar (which despite the name is available cross-platform, not just on Linux) do pretty much everything you might possibly need as far as simple songwriting goes, plus a lot more.

Re: Show HN: Songcraft – Online Songwriting Platform and Guitar Tab Builder

#23
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.

Re: Show HN: Songcraft – Online Songwriting Platform and Guitar Tab Builder

#24
post #23

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.

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!

Re: Show HN: Songcraft – Online Songwriting Platform and Guitar Tab Builder

#26
post #21

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 arrang…

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!

Re: Show HN: Songcraft – Online Songwriting Platform and Guitar Tab Builder

#27
post #25

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: Songcraft – Online Songwriting Platform and Guitar Tab Builder

#30

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

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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