Songnotes is my personal music notation collection, featuring hand-crafted chords/lyrics/tabs for songs I love playing on guitar. Visit Songnotes online at http://www.songnotes.cc
There are a few reasons:
- To help me easily remember how to play songs I learned in the past. By typing out chords/lyrics/tabs and posting them online, I'm able to access my past work on any device from wherever I may be. In a sense, Songnotes is a digital extension of my music-notation memory.
- To help others learn how to play songs I've spent a lot of time figuring out. Given everything noted in the prior list item, it seems silly not to let others benefit from the music notation work I've done.
- To give myself a playground to exercise my muscles de la Ruby on Rails, product design, UX/UI/visual design, front-end development, and so on. Putting all of these skillsets to use on a real-world project is immensely satisfying and has helped me learn a great deal.
Songnotes is powered by a CMS I built with Ruby on Rails. Aside from crafting the CMS (which is relatively simple), a particular challenge was crafting the song#show view in which a single template was necessary to display all songs in the Songnotes library. Given the vast variability of factors that go into any given song -- it was a great challenge to figure out a design that worked across the board without feeling "CMS-y" and bland.
Unfortunately, at this time I have no plans to accept outside song contributions into the Songnotes library. For one, this is a personal library that reflects my own guitar-playing history -- and for the time being I want to keep it this way. Song requests are welcome, though I can make no promises about when or if I'll add them to the library (as it is, I'm working on razor-thin margins of available time to dedicate to this site).
Thanks! Email any questions or comments to info@songnotes.cc or davidpots@gmail.com