I’ve been thinking the idea for this app for quite a long time. As a jazz musician, repertoire is important. Unlike a lot of musical genres, for jazz, the set list is decided on the fly. A professional jazz musician is expected to know hundreds of tunes, preferably from memory.
What I found is that I tended to practice the same “fun” tunes and there were a lot of tunes that I didn’t practice and didn’t get played much so I tended to forget them. The idea of this app is basically a fancy to-do app. You have a list of tunes. When you practice a tune, you press it and that time gets logged. The list is sorted with the tunes you have not practiced in the longest time at the top.This way, I can more easily keep all my tunes practiced.
Take a look at the app:
Right now it is just local, stores the values in the browser memory. My plan is to allow the creation of accounts and sync across instances, and eventually a mobile version.
It’s built with React, Redux, Redux Saga, and Bootstrap. It’s hosted through AWS so it’s a chance to learn that environment. (And a chance to do some React since I’ve been doing React Native for the last several years.)
Have a look. Try it out. Let me know if you have any thoughts.
I look at this and I wonder about extending it to include, for example, ChordPro diagrams for songs. Doing so, when a song is selected for practice, a basic view (like, for example, http://ukegeeks.com/songeditor) might display the song with chord charts or tab riffs).
Absolutely beautiful, clean, great options. I really like this one!
Yeah, that kind of gets beyond the intention of the app. First, I was thinking more about jazz/classical musicians working on repertoire - they don’t use chord diagrams or tabs, even the guitar players.
Also, it’s really about maintaining the repertoire, not keeping a library of music. The idea is to really learn the piece so you can throw away the sheet music and then maintain your repertoire. This is different than how rock/pop players tend to approach things, having a rotating set list of 30-50 tunes. Jazz musicians are trying to learn 200-500 tunes.
I was thinking about maybe adding the ability to link to an outside pdf and/or audio file (local or remote). But again, that’s kind of getting away from how I am envisioning this app to be used. As a gigging jazz and classical musician for 25 years, this is the app that I wish I had. When I talk to other jazz and classical musicians, this is what they like to here. Perhaps it is a niche market, but I’d rather focus on doing that well. After that, maybe I’ll think about expanding it out. I’m really building the app that I want.
But who knows, maybe in the future. I just have priorities before that: remote storage, mobile version, maybe some practice feature for rudiments like scales, etc., some kind of account system, et al.
