This is the motivation for me to build Tananã, the music app with the coolest name ever, if you speak portuguese. Here’s an audio with the pronunciation:

insert some audio with me saying/singing tananã

I’m an amateur musician. Like many other people that studied guitar, I know some theory. Like the major, minor and blues scales. If you don’t know anything about it, please, bear with me, you don’t really need to know about music (or software development) to understand what I’m saying.

A lot of people with this profile (know some theory, amateur guitarists) didn’t really studied music score notation. The one with that weird S on the start. Well, first of all, it’s actually a G (I know, what a shock). Here’s an image if it’s not clicking for you:

insert music score print here

One thing you may ask is why is that useful? and that’s fair. But even with these alternative notations being easier to learn, they’re limited in some aspects. And then you’re stuck with them. A more detailed explanation of those limitations are below, you can skip it if you’re not interested.

Guitar tabs don’t show tempo information. Letters are exclusive for chords. There’s similar to tabs notation for the flute and the harmonica with the same limitations. To read all of those notations you either need to:

• understand the standard music score notation for the tempo info
• already know well the song

The current state of music score apps in an amateur perspective

There are a lot of good apps already out there for self-learning. But most of them are paid. The free ones are always freemium and for a specific instrument. And from a latin american perspective, they’re quite expensive and need the use of a credit card, a thing most people don’t have access to.

I thought well, people should learn from musescore (a very good open source alternative) or something similar, but then I realised that even I wasn’t willing to use those apps for studying. They are focused on creating music sheets, not training and learning. A student should have a good UX and the simplest possible interface in front of them. It really bothered me that some of those apps was like a nuclear reactor full of buttons occupying space on the screen. The paid student-focused apps aren’t like that.

So, there’s the motivation for Tananã: a free, open source educative app for learning music sheet with an enjoyable UX.

What about the future?

I’m planning on launching a beta version still in this year. From that it would be nice to have feedback on ohow to enhance the basic experience, and get some feedback from teatchers too. From that it could be possible to create a good interactive introduction using the tananã interface.

There are also some other plans, but that’s all for now, folks 😉