As a beginner, I often I find myself humming along the tune while practicing the rhythm section. I’m trying to cement the chord progression for a given song in my head.
It’d be great if you could give “picking the basic melody” a similar treatment as you have for “strumming the chords.”
I’m imagining you might key in the tablature and that would get played over the chords. (eg June 2018 - Old Joe Clark). You could choose to have the melody come in every time or trade off to practice transitioning between playing the melody and backing.
I’ll admit I have no idea how difficult this would be to build, and I know it would add a lot of complexity to the interaction model, but would be useful to me!
Love Strummachine and grateful that you are actively developing the product, and now community.
Hey Frankie, sorry I didn’t respond earlier. That is indeed a big feature request. I would love to be able to offer some melody-related features, but they’ll have to wait until I’ve completed some of the other features on my list. The biggest problem with melodies, more than it being a ton of work, is actually copyright… I can offer chords without licensing them, but the same isn’t true for melodies. I’m honestly not sure what my licensing options are, and will probably have to consult an attorney familiar with music copyright law. But that’s a whole can of worms that I’m not eager to open, so for now I’m going to focus on other ways of making Strum Machine. But I’m too excited about the idea to let go of it entirely!
Agree that copyright could be an issue. (Though when I’m learning a new tune, I buy it and stream it a bunch of times so that should actually help the copyright holder out )
One possible way to make it less of a big feature and negligible copyright issue is if you make it possible to put our own “annotations” along the top of each bar. My sheet music at home has all sorts of annotations on it such as “this is where the double stop happens” , must be an up bow here" etc.If we could do this on Strummie it would be helpful in and of it self, but it would also mean that we could add in the melody as notes along the tops of the bar. Doesn’t quite give it a ‘play along’ function, but it does mean we can play from the sheet music as well as see where we are supposed to be in it at any given chord point. But, as with previous, I have no idea if this is hard to code, and hate the idea of anything that takes away the gorgeous simplicity of Strummie so…take my suggestions with a grain of salt.
On a related note (and probably just a hard), I would love to see a built-in feature that allowed users to record audio (melody or solo) while listening to the backing track.
I would love to be able to offer some melody-related features, but they’ll have to wait until I’ve completed some of the other features on my list. The biggest problem with melodies, more than it being a ton of work, is actually copyright… I can offer chords without licensing them, but the same isn’t true for melodies. I’m honestly not sure what my licensing options are, and will probably have to consult an attorney familiar with music copyright law. But that’s a whole can of worms that I’m not eager to open, so for now I’m going to focus on other ways of making Strum Machine. But I’m too excited about the idea to let go of it entirely!
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