Ideas for a Bachido / Shamisen Android App!

General
#1

Bachido member Teague, who created the graphic for the Bachido Blogcast, has generously offered to design an app for Bachido!

I’m very excited about this! I’ve felt an app would be highly used by active Bachido members, but I’m not sure what it would be.

This is where you come in! As a member of Bachido or shamisen enthusiast, what would you like to see in a Bachido / shamisen app? Perhaps a streamlined way to view the ridiculously active forum posts? Or a tuner for shamisen?

Don’t hold back your thoughts. Your ideas will greatly influence what kind of app is made! Thanks for your suggestions, and major thanks to Teague for his time and generosity!

#2

A few that pop into my head first:

  • Tuner/tuning samples
  • “local events”
  • (major) calendar events
  • (lesson) tabs
  • messaging/mail

I’m pretty sure there are a million things we could do with/in an app.

#3

Cool Idea

As Adrian already stated, tuner/tuning samples and lesson tabs are crucial (offline enabled).

Then:

  • Shamisen Shop/Store
  • Blogcast channel
  • Member Video Upload-Area (youtube linked)
  • Karls Shamisen Composer (with air-print feature)
  • messaging sounds like fun =)
  • Shamisen maintenance video-samples (offline enabled)

Ahhh, and make it available for Apple Devices too =)

Thanks
Ale

#4

exciting project :slight_smile: as for me I would say the mobile version of the site works mighty fine in the regular browser on the phone so if anything I would be okay with an app only having a personal message alert or whatever so no or hardly a connection to the site would be fine with me . . .

so I would definitely prefer the useful and fun features direction with what could be offline gadgets starting with a tuner, a tab collection for some tunes and/or an integrated pdf viewer for one’s own tabs, a virtual shamisen to touchscreen play on, a shamisen hero game, a glossary of shamisen terms and a related shamisen quiz that randomly fetches 10 terms and presents 3 multiple choice answers for each term and depending on how many out of random 10 terms you got right you get crushed by a “sanshin player” or “god of shamisen” rating grade or whatever something in between . . .

and so on the beauty of it is the whole app could be set up overall and started even with a tuner alone already and additional gadgets or extensions for existing gadgets could be released in update versions of the app according to whatever additional bits and pieces Teague feels like implementing whenever he has time to do something over time . . .

#5

Nice to see someone else make an effort for the shamisen in the new world! I’m currently working on major improvements to the Shamisen Composer and it is getting closer to release. The idea is to customize it to work on mobile devices after the release, so having it inside the app would require the code to be rewritten into the app’s code. But the app could definately host a browser inside it that goes to the site.

I’ll think about what would be good in an app, but the suggestions above are really good!

#6

Shamisen App sounds exciting! I would definitely love to have a tuner. Also links to everyone’s videos, and maybe an alert for upcoming Shamisen performances nearby?

#7

I’d say that the app should have some different ways of demonstrating what the shamisen is for people who have never heard of it. It’s quite troublesome to start explaining and look up youtube clips etc that would fit the particular person’s tastes. The app should be able to quickly impress new listeners.

#8

Oh man, I’m feeling the spotlight on me.

Disclaimer: Just so everyone knows I’m still working for my computer science degree so I’m still fairly new to app development. I would love to take on the opportunity to improve my programming abilities while also contributing to the Bachido community. I don’t want to get peoples hopes up for some really amazing app but I’ll certainly be doing my best. It will be a huge learning experience for me.

That being said, I hope I can produce a satisfactory app for you all and I’ll be putting in everything I’ve got to make it so.

#9

Just the fact that you want to take it on makes me admire you, Teague! Well done, you!

#10

Hey guys,

Just to check in I did not forget about this! It’s been pretty crazy here on campus taking 3x computer science classes at once (and then some side stuff) From the looks of it, I will most likely be creating a tuner app that will look like the pitch pipe sold here on the Bachido store http://bachido.com/images/products/full-size/tuner_pipe_1.jpg

Hopefully I’ll be able to pull off some openGL implementation and have a 3D model of it in the app.

I don’t want to promise anything in terms of time constraints because I have no idea how this semester is going to turn out for me free-time wise so I’ll just say that I will definitely get to it eventually :P.

#11

Hey Teague!

Whoa nellie, you’re crazy busy! Making a pitch-pipe style tuner would be so awesome. Ooh! What if it could sound out a note like a regular pitch pipe, but could also act as an electronic tuner by detecting your pitch and showing how sharp/flat it is?

No doubt it would take some time, especially with your schedule. I think there’s been desire among members to have an app for over two years, so just the fact that you have a great idea and want to do it is plenty exciting! :slight_smile:

#12

From a coding perspective, I don’t see too many issues with getting something like that working. The problem is that, with no musical background, terminology and how tuners and notes work is beyond my understanding. There are quite a few music majors I know that would be willing to help though.

#13

I would love something that also included more sheet music if that is possible. I watched the bachido blogcast number 36 and I saw the performance that Kevin and Kyle did with Kyle’s brothers. If there was an app with a list of sheet music for songs that would be epic. Tuners would be nice as well because I still need to learn another tuning besides niagari.

#14

Ah! That is something we also have to discuss. As well as notation, I would like to have Karl’s Shamisen Composer visibly set somewhere on the site, not just stickied on the forum.

It would be epic to have a page dedicated to notation and making it. User created/submitted. However, when discussing it with Luke, the one problem we thought was of the legality of hosting notation of potentially copyrighted songs…

Any thoughts about that?

#15

We wouldn’t be selling the individual songs though (at least that’s what I thought). It would just be a notation system using Karl’s shamisen composer in an app format, with other features such as a tuner or a calendar of events like Adrian was talking about. So from what I understand we could still put in some songs like what’s in the back of “tsugaru shamisen of japan”. That I assume would not be infringing on any copyright. My idea was that it could be like a huge list of names you can scroll through and when you touched one it would bring up the notation for that song. That was my idea anyway. I’ll ask my father about any ways to avoid copyrighting songs, seeing as how he is a lawyer he should be able to tell me something. I’ll post something if I come up with any more ideas or find out anything that could help.

#16

I think it depends on where the songs are hosted. I know for a fact that in Sweden you get fined and sent to jail if the site has lots of copyrighted material.

#17

Jack,
I see! Oh yeah, that would be excellent for a tablet! :slight_smile: Excellent! I look forward to hearing what your father says.

I know for a fact that in Sweden you get fined and sent to jail if the site has lots of copyrighted material.

That’s encouraging! :wink:

Hmm… well, what if we had a forum-like page for the Shamisen Composer and people could personally host their notation on something like googlecloud or dropbox?

I’m sure there are MANY sites with guitar tab for Totoro, Naruto and such copyrighted songs that people would like to learn on shamisen. If the notation isn’t being sold and on a public forum, I doubt it’d be a huge deal.

Peeerhaps?

#18

Okay, so one of friends told me how you tell if it a song is a copy write. He says they have clips of each original song and if the clip from the original matches with a different clip from a new song exactly, then it’s a copyright. I think if we write a program based off of intervals in a notation system. We can have it run through original song clips and check the natation you have written and see if it is an exact copy. Kind of like when you choose a username for any account online, you have to make one that isn’t taken. This is hard in term of music but it can be done. As long as there are no matching clips or motifs there should be no problem. Also we should keep an eye out for possible songs that could be copyrighted on the form and we should take them off if they seem really sketchy. If anything does come up you can remove it from the site to avoid lawsuit.

On a side note: the app should have a feature to save notations to pdf to view offline. When you write notation with Karl’s awesome program the only thing I find is that you can’t save it and work on it later and you can’t add the note lines to indicate half notes and quarter notes. If this was fixed in the app that would be nice.

On another side note: My dad is typing up a paper to send to me about copyright laws. So when I get that I’ll post it, and a summary of it on this page.

#19

Older tunes would probably have expired copyrights and that could cover a good bunch of well known shamisen tunes or other folk songs I guess … as with mozart anyone is free to perform or transcribe his tunes although of course any such “interpretation” is again copyrighted by the creator so no xerox copying of notation or uploading a clip of someone elses performance even when the tune itself has become public domain …

#20

Jack you can save songs with the Shamisen Composer. It utilizes Local Storage in your web browser though, so if you have it set up to be cleared every now and then it will remove your songs as well.

The song format is not optimized right now, but it is possible to go into local storage and copy the song manually and put it in a text file. You can then later add it in the same way it was added by the program only you do it manually.

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