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Show HN: Nevertwenty – Play along with any song using real-time chords

by brandoniscool on 6/1/23, 1:17 AM with 10 comments

Hey there, Hacker News community! I've just brought my dream app to life, and I'm eager to share it with you all. At a glance, it might seem like a search engine, but it's really so much more. It's an intuitive tool specifically designed for practicing musicians.

What's the magic ingredient, you ask? The app shows users critical musical details about any song of their choice - but that's not even the best part. The real showstopper is that it can unveil the underlying chord structure of the song, which enables musicians to play along, learn the song, and anticipate the upcoming chord sequence in real time.

I'm continually looking to enhance the player features, so your feedback is more than welcome! I've recently incorporated a feature allowing users to adjust the beats per minute (BPM), and now I'm in the process of adding a tuner as well.

Let's hit the right notes together on this one, folks! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Only works on desktop. Working on getting mobile working and compatibility for Safari.

Built with the latest nextjs. react, node. Am pretty satisfied with the software stack I used. I wasn't familiar with nextjs but as an experience full stack developer, I didn't find it too difficult learn and actually quite pleasant to use as my feature set grew.

The biggest application limitation right now is the not perfect timing of the chord preview and bpm speed. Ideally the animation of these components should be perfectly correlated with the beat. I'm working on a betting timing implementation.

Cheers! -brandon

  • by jrajav on 6/1/23, 4:19 PM

    This is great! I absolutely love the concept and a lot of the ideas you've already put into execution.

    Some feedback:

    - The first song I tried was 15 Step - like a lot of Radiohead's stuff it's in 5/4. This wasn't accounted for, instead the beat counter just stuttered through either 1 or 4 every measure. Forgivable since most apps and sites don't even attempt to have a beat counter!

    - Love the moving chord 'preview' allowing sight reading of what's coming up next. There are a couple of issues with it though - the first is simple, it's not aligned well so it jumps around as smaller dots and larger chord symbols scroll through, making it a lot harder to visually track especially in periphery. The second issue is that it doesn't delineate beats and measures very well, which makes it pretty hard to use it to predict the timing of chord changes, which would be very handy. This is more an issue of visualization than exact timing. If I know the rough structure of the next measure or two I can handle the timing just fine.

  • by schemathings on 6/1/23, 1:26 PM

    That's crazy cool. Just sent a link to a youtuber I follow with a song he recently covered.

    A nice down the road feature would be the ability to download a .mid file (I like to mess around with those in Reaper).

    Quite fun and impressive, well done!

  • by gilleain on 6/1/23, 10:32 AM

    Heh, not knowing anything about music, I gave it the only test I could think of - 'Cornflake Girl' by Tori Amos.

    https://www.nevertwenty.live/view/tfC0-pVpQWw

    I assume it was getting the notes right?

    Nice interface, anyway - very smooth!

  • by the_new_guy on 6/1/23, 11:22 AM

    This is friggin' amazing. What I would have given for something like this 10-20 years ago. Great job!

  • by gremke on 6/1/23, 2:57 AM

    The fact that this gets you playing along made this fun to play with. The tuner will be really useful.

  • by dankai on 6/1/23, 2:26 PM

    Super cool! Thank you! The feature reminds me of the software "Band in a box" from many, many years ago.

  • by telotortium on 6/1/23, 2:15 AM

    Does this work on any song, or only the songs that have been analyzed?