SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  11/14/05; 11:19:31 PM Msg#:  4611 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  4610/4612 Reads:  19820

SongTrellis Workscores

We introduced the new Chord Grid feature on SongTrellis on Friday, and explained how the SongTrellis Excerpt Service works late Saturday. Now its time to tell SongTrellis members how to use the Workscore that is now available for them to use on the site.

From the intro:
"A SongTrellis workscore provides you with your own personal music score (one for each SongTrellis member) which you can edit from your web browser.
You can enter existing progressions into your workscore to hear how they sound and use it to invent new chord progressions for yourself."

Tomorrow I'm going to explain how outline documents encoded in the OPML format can help us navigate through musical compositions. Sounds like a total geekfest, but believe me its going to be interesting.

SongTrellis has been Scobleized

Robert Scoble is one of the more famous bloggers on the planet. He's a Microsoft software evangelist who through his Scobleizer weblog has literally become the voice of Microsoft on the Web. I think he makes more of an impact than Waggener-Edstrom, the PR company that the company has used for decades. If you get a mention in Robert's blog, you've been Scobleized.

Robert comments very frequently about the daily industry byplay between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. A reader challenged Robert to change his pattern and bring other developments to people's attention besides the actions of this gargantuan trio. He's resolved to point to 100 non-GYM items of interest before he goes back to the main event.

His "No GYM #4" item from Sunday is titled New Web service for musicians: ChordGrid. Scoble sez: "This Web Service thing will be huge someday, I tell you. Here Dave Luebbert turned on chordGrid yesterday." Thanks for the vote of confidence, Robert!

A scoffing comment deserves an answer

Now of course one of his readers, Brandon Paddock, in the comments to that asks: "Interesting, but what makes that a web service?". Brandon also mentions that "it doesnít look half as useful as www.chordfind.com".

ChordFind is a very capable assistant that helps guitarists figure out how to play new chords. The new Chord Grid is tuned to let its users very quickly invent new harmonic ideas. I try to explain how the services differ in comment #2.

Dave Luebbert also Scobleized a few days earlier

That happened because Robert was announcing the availability of a video interview that he conducted with Dean Hachamovitch and your webmaster back in June. It appears on Microsoft's Channel 9 site, which usually is devoted to interviews with the great people at Microsoft who are working on the company's newest software ventures. In this case, the interest was in software past, how things used to work on the Microsoft Word development teams, especially Macintosh Word.

Dean and I both worked on MacWord 5.0, which some folks claim was the best version of that word processor that was ever shipped. (Actually, folks say it was the 5.1 release that was the pinnacle which was shipped by my friend, Dave McKinnis, and his team, mostly folks I trained, a few months later).

I was the lead programmer for the 5.0 project. And Dean was a sharp young program manager, just graduated from Harvard, whose first project was MacWord 5.0. He claims he learned a lot about how software is done by watching my team at work, and counts me as a mentor. I'm honored that he says that. He now leads the project to produce Internet Explorer 7.0 for Microsoft in Redmond, WA.

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