I Rebuilt Chord Mage. Again. But Now It's a Web Application

I know… I know. Rebuilt again? To be honest, I didn’t expect it to happen, but I had to give in.

Chord Mage is a project I started because I wanted to understand music theory and share my findings with other musicians.

The reason I built an app around it was to prove I could make an app, and it was a while since I did so. And it did work just fine.

But let’s talk about the new version first.

What’s new in Chord Mage

Because it’s a web application this time, you can open it anywhere you have a browser and internet. That is neat! No need to go to an app store to find and download it.

You’ll find the application at: https://chordmage.com.

The application was given a new updated look and feel. You make progressions just as the mobile app would, but with a few extras.

1. There is now a metronome for you to play along with your progression
2. Set up the time signature you play in
3. Change the BPM of the backing track
4. Chord (and metronome) samples load on the spot

Why the change?

In short: mobile app development and deployment is a lot harder than web development.

When I started Chord Mage I didn’t really expect mobile development to be that much different from what I do from day to day. Which in theory is true, but in practise was a bit different.

I wasn’t 100% at home in mobile app development, so I made the mistake of picking the wrong framework to work in to start with.

The second thing that I didn’t really realise was that what I wanted to do with the app was not your run-of-the-mill type of app you’d want to build in a framework like React Native.

The moment I started implementing a metronome I ran into some issues with performance and very quick and time crucial triggering sounds.

This was fine, but quickly turned into a mess of me trying to work around the framework and hack my way to a solution for something that might have been better if I built it natively. And I didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole.

So… I moved back to what I know best.

Focus on the right thing

Doing this all in my free time and with the goal to learn more about music theory I thought it was smart to move away from what was holding me back and move to a way of working that doesn’t require more time than needed.

And here it is. Easy to deploy and distribute. Easier to build. Focussed on learning music theory.

Next up

While building this version I thought of a feature I want to add next. I want to create a sort of song book you can fill will songs and sheet music so you can practise songs and see the sheet music at the same time.

I am specifying the idea and the requirements and am going to see if I can add this feature soon. It would surely help myself with learning song for my guitar practise. I’ve had this idea as a separate application for a while, but it makes sense to try and integrate it into Chord Mage!

Cheers.