Trial Run · Omni Guitars

Trial Run

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!

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