I'm musical-ish. I can read, learn, and decently play complicated piano songs. I can sight-read pretty well. I have rhythm. I played a decent saxophone through high school and could probably make it sound ok even today. But for some reason, I have absolutely never been able to memorize songs, write songs, or understand why what I'm playing sounds good. My childhood piano teacher, Mrs. Lorio, would have us to her house once a month on Saturday mornings specifically for something like a music theory workshop, but she didn't stand a chance to convince a 10-year-old boy that music theory was important. There were also cookies. In college I was interested enough that I took a music theory class at the University of Michigan which was awesome, but it didn't have anything to do with the practical application of music theory - it just wasn't possible in that environment for non-music majors.

I believe that through interactive music theory exercises directly integrated with songwriting - whether it be a few measures or a complete song - I can begin to close some of my own gaps, and that's why I started to develop this site. At first I just wanted my own interactive chord library, then I wanted to sort, organize, and re-order chords so I could listen to my library. Then, I wanted to use these organized chords to try to write a melody.

Then, I realized I didn't know enough about how to pick, sort, and organize chords or apply a melody - let alone create an entire song - so this project continued to grow. But I only knew how to code in a perfunctory manner, and AI helped me to fill that gap (in my experience AI does seem great for making websites, but is also pretty infuriating. Let me know if you want to talk about it).

And that brings us to where we are now. I think this is one of, if not the most, comprehensive practical and interactive music theory + songwriting things out there. There are many great applications and tools that do a better job at pieces of what I'm trying to provide to you and you should check them out, but I don't think they even try to bring it all together in this way. It's not why they were created. This application is meant to be for the aspiring musician and songwriter who doesn't have "it", but it can also be for those who do. This application isn't meant to be Suno - give Suno a vibe and some lyrics and have it write a whole song for you.

This is meant for the person who wants to get their hands a little dirtier and learn and understand what's going on. Why do these things sound good together and in sequence. And you get to pick how you want it go. If you get stuck with creating music, there are some tunable algorithms (i.e. you can pick whether you want to emphasize voice leading, harmonic function, style/mood, etc.) that are meant to provide guidance and suggestions for chord progressions, melody, texture/harmony, and more, but I think of these - based on your use case - as being somewhere between fun toys for exploration and valuable suggestions for the musician with writer's block or just looking for the spark of an idea. This isn't meant to write the song for you. It's specifically meant for not that.

As far as other features, there are interactive theory and writing lessons that integrate with the rest of the site. You can start from a significant library of progressions and edit them to your desired sound. You can even upload your own .wav or .mp3 files and we can detect with decent accuracy the bass chords and duration of each chord and get those chords down in musical notation. You can do this with your songwriting samples you've recorded and you're trying to streamline getting them down on paper or your favorite band's song (unfortunately I can't point to YouTube links directly for legal reasons. It's gotta be your own files).

None of the above text was written by AI!