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! 
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Jack,
I see! Oh yeah, that would be excellent for a tablet! 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! 
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?
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.
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 …
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.
I think it’s all a matter of extent. I think anything really becomes a concern for authority when someone is unfairly profiting from another’s work, exploiting it by means of file-sharing, or copying someone’s work. Transcribing Yoshida Brother pieces would definitely require permission, as it’s a shamisen-specific song.
For pop songs however, I speculate that it’d be more relaxed. It takes time and money to go after people, so I wouldn’t think it’d be worth it for “them” to crack down on a few shamisen enthusiasts wanting to play Poker Face note-for-note on shamisen.
I’m just speculating though.
Just don’t host anything in sweden then …
Just don’t host anything in sweden then …
Which is why I remove the generated PDF files from the server every 10 minutes!
Smart Seriously I would lean towards airtight and bored lawyer proof rather than “probably” no one will bother too …
Hi everyone. My father is trying to be thorough, so it will take a little more time before I can arrive at a definite answer. Here is a link to occupy the mind for the time being, this talks about all copyright laws and infringement situations in the USA. Here is the link below.
So my dad got back to me, and the simple version of what he said is that there is no problem creating a tab for notation of user content. Even if the song is close it’s not copy write if it’s not the same. It’s like a light motif, you can use it in many songs, and they sound similar, but they are not the same. We can freely post notation but we cannot charge for it, and cannot post notation For famous Preexisting songs. Good luck making the rest of the app. If you get stuck I know a lot of programmers that may be able to help.
Oh sweet!!! That’s very reassuring to know. Many thanks to your father for finding out this important information for all of us! 
One question, what does he mean by “famous Preexisting songs”? Happy Birthday or Billie Jean?
I’ll send it to my bro now, as well.
Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. I meant that songs that have been copy written and have existed for less than 2 years probaby shouldn’t be posted. This is true unless the artist or another associated source to the artist has released the notation prior to the upload of the notation to the app. Also you can post the chords to a song anytime. Although songs can be copy written, a chord progression cannot. To the best of my knowledge this information is still true unless they have changed it in the past few months.
Thanks for your reply, Jack! Very interesting. Crazy stuff, that you can’t post chord progression. I guess music piracy includes the ability to play it for oneself too.
To be safe, I guess it’s probably best not to post any notation at all?
I think it would be the safest option for now to not post any. But it is something to consider later on I guess. I don’t want the app to be removed the same day it comes out if something does happen. You can try to put notation up later on though, because we can always just take it off of it becomes a problem.