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Chords Songbooks - A Zach DeCook project

Zach DeCook

2017-08-28

Started in early 2017, the tabs website (or Songbooks) was one that was a long time coming.

Check it out here!

Features

The songs are parsed from a plain text file.

History

What does a good singalong need? Music. And enough for everybody. My dad's classic brief-case-full-a-tunes was always providing for a great time around a campfire. Over the years, though, something kept happening. Some minor tweak in the system font would result in hours of headache for somebody.

The project evolved into the digital age thanks to the likes of one GetDropbox Dot Com. Whenever a jam session was going to go down, one would just need an iPad and a copy of the latest PDF.

PDFs are kind of cumbersome, and when they get long enough, even modern devices start to hang. They are also static content. In the days of paper, my progenitor would differentiate keys with different colors.

In 2016, I asked for an e-reader for my birthday. I wanted it mostly for reading music. My phone was in the habit of running out of power on me, and having multiple devices seemed like a good idea at the time. Super-fancy it was, and very well featured as well, but the gray tones of the screen made it hard to determine what key I was in.

Thusly, this project was born. The biggest task being the data manipulation... Somebody has to fix the spacing on all those songs again.