What songs do you or would you play around a campfire? I'm partial to the old classics, Camptown Races, She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain, Home on the Range, I've Been Working on the Railroad, Oh! Susanna, This Land is Your Land, and Clementine. What other suggestions do you have for me? I want to play songs people will probably know the words to, so they can sing along. So maybe, Row Row Row Your Boat, Michael Row the Boat Ashore, On Top of Spaghetti?

Took my TAB music sharing app out for a test drive last night, hung out at a local Starbucks and had three instruments with me. Brought my Fender electric uke, a 1924 La Pacific banjolele, and a mandolin I was recently gifted. At first, I was simply building collections and set lists for various event types - build a Reggae collection, an Easy Listening set, a Church shows set - to see if it was quickly searchable and accessible. Building the sets, testing the songs (I’ve loaded in about 3,000 chordpro files from the Olga Archives to get started), and having the excuse to jam in public… But while I was sitting there noodling about, a guy came in with a Backpacker guitar. We got talking, he pulled out his tablet and shot the session-share code on my screen, and real-time got the session set that I was trying out. Got all the songs in the set, set his preferred instrument, and opened the song I was playing and got chords custom to his instrument (guitar for him, uke for me). But the song was in A minor, and I really like (and he preferred) D minor. Easily fixed - there’s a transpose option right in the song viewer. And when I transpose on my device, as the session host? Every connected device sees the transposition live.. The chord names change in the song, and the chord diagrams update dynamically. If I add a verse to a song (and only the host can edit/transpose, otherwise it’d be chaos), that change ripples out real-time through the session. Even if we’re offline. There are a few bugs still to work out, but by golly, it’s shaping up nicely!

Hey all - a while back, I wrote about being a music/nerd crossover, about this chord-component and chord-list thing that I'd built in order to wrap a javascript package (`svguitar`) into a useful, easy-to-consume tool that lets me just `<chord-component instrument="Standard Guitar" chord="Dm7"></chord-component>` and it renders out the SVG chord diagram. It's neat, it was fun, I'm working on a series of articles about it from the programming side. But I've been working with that, and with a comprehensive TAB editor/renderer doohickey that I'm calling Gigwidget - it lets me create or edit songs and collections, it lets me fetch TAB sheets (currently scraped from ozbcoz.com as it's one of the more comprehensive TAB collections I know of), it lets me choose the instrument I want to use and it renders those chord charts dynamically. It'll handle transposition seamlessly, and it's pretty much working. It currently is in *very* early development, but it does allow for users to sync their data remotely (via Supabase) and use their account on multiple devices. There are two things I'm working on adding to it: 1) The UI is rough. It works, but I'm seeing it more as an interface like GMail or the like, with a sidebar listing collections, a top panel with a list from the chosen collection, and the main content pane showing the currently-selected song. 2) Session-sharing. I want to be able to have a user create a session (say, at a jam or something), and then get a QR code that others at that jam can scan *and get the full setlist for that jam*. While it appears to be stubbed in currently, the "join the session" bit hasn't yet integrated with the "share the full setlist" bit. If anyone wants to hammer on it, I'm totally down to share it for review and opinions - I just don't want to violate community policy by blindly sharing links.

Wanted to share a project I've been working on, more as a component of a larger one but largely a standalone. As an amateur musician, I've been looking for ways of displaying custom chord diagrams inline (for example, in TAB music charts). The `svguitar` library is pretty effective, but it requires a fair knowledge of js to implement it - not really a "plug and play option". So I built the thing. With this, I can `<chord-diagram instrument="Standard Mandolin" chord="Dm7"></chord-diagram>` in the HTML and all the js contained. It includes some logic (lazy logic) to generate chords dynamically, but it also includes a chord editor - and the way I've built it, it looks first for a user override, then a system override, and only if it doesn't find those does it use the dynamic utility. It's a Custom Web Component built with Lit.js, it can be standalone or used as part of a contextual system (so if a user is logged in, there can be a user context). If any of y'all are interested, https://github.com/parent-tobias/chord-component - feel free to beat on it and use it if you have an application for it. If you are (or know) a web developer, this could be useful. It is pretty niche, but it's darn useful within that niche lol

We’re giving away the amazing Orangewood Morgan Live AGAIN — but this time in beautiful SPRUCE! 🌲 Who’s pumped?! 🙌 Tell us — if you could pick any song to play first on this beauty, what would it be? Drop your answers below! 👇🔥 I will pick a couple of the comments that I like best and send you a FREE T-Shirt!