18 Sep

guitar site project

Bronwyn is learning guitar. One headache we’ve already encountered is that there doesn’t appear to be a site which allows you to simply enter the chords you know, and have a list of matching songs returned.

So I’m thinking of writing one.

And, because I’m not really interested in chords myself, I’m going to make this into a sort of competitive site where songs and players can be ranked by difficulty/skill.

Bronwyn’s requirements will be easy to meet:

  • login
  • record the chords you know (or choose them from a list)
  • search a database of songs that match that list.
  • The songs will either show the tab/chords for the song in a page on the site, or will link to an external source if I can’t put them on the site for some reason (copyright, etc).
  • record the songs you know/are learning, so you can easily keep track of them.

For myself, and I suspect a lot of others, there’s a more complex list:

  • rank songs according to how many people know it vs are learning it (simple difficulty algorithm)
  • allow people to link to youtube/etc videos of themselves playing the song
  • allow people to optionally be ranked according to the songs they’ve mastered – this adds a bit of competition and therefore interest to the site
  • people with high ranks need to prove it. allow other high-ranked people to request a specific song that the person says they know – that person then has a week to upload a video of them playing it or they lose credibility.
  • credibility is ranked 0-100, and measures how much a person can be believed. it’s only shown in cases where a person is obviously lying.

Anything else i should try to place in the requirements list before I start writing?

4 thoughts on “guitar site project”

  1. Will Knott -

    The copyright thing will bite you. Check to make sure you can legally list the chords in a song (should be OK, but check first), there are cases of copyright owners and/or agencies hunting down the tab listings.

    Something that might be useful is a list of your “friends” who are learning the same song. And a tick box (etc) for having completed the song.

    It would be interesting if you could get a guitar hero for actual guitars working (use a microphone to estimate rhythm and pitch). As its automated then voting isn’t required. Ringers are however possible. As is the legal situation, but you might be able to get the blessings of an agency or label to try it out at least.

  2. steve -

    one more… a threshold of chrords would be handy.. thus if i only know 4 chords, but i ‘ask’ for songs i can do… but if it only has 1 new chord, then i’m okay to learn a bit. 😉

  3. Kae Verens -

    I threw together the bare bones of it here.

    That’s basically Bronwyn’s list.

    Steve, nice idea. I’ll add that in later today.

    Will, I think I can get around the problem by simply linking to external sites that have the tab. No need to have multiple copies of tabs on multiple sites…

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