For guitar players, the Internet is at once inspiring and infuriating. On YouTube alone, there are thousands of talented guitarists, professional and otherwise, who post videos of original songs and covers. Some of these videos are tutorials, while others are simply performances. Frequently, the subjects of these videos are asked for tabs (or tablature files) of these songs and, more often than not, what’s provided doesn’t actually make learning the song much easier.
Frustrated by the lack of resources for music enthusiasts, Chicago-based developer Adrian Holovaty (formerly of EveryBlock) created Soundslice. Currently, Holovaty is the only full time Slicer, while designer PJ Macklin helps out on nights and weekends.
“For years, I’ve spent a lot of time transcribing music — figuring out how to play stuff, from small licks to chord changes to entire solos or arrangements,” Holovaty says. “I built Soundslice first and foremost for myself, to make it easier to learn songs.”
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Soundslice is built off the YouTube API. Musicians can enter search for any YouTube video on Soundslice.com, where they can slow down playback or create loops. Registered users have the added options of adding tab annotations, chord charts and favoriting segments of songs.
Holovaty says Soundslice is for “musicians who have a hunger for learning. Which is basically every musician.” He drew on his experience building Web applications for this project, which includes creating the Django web framework off of which Pinterest and Instagram are built, but says he’s never developed anything so similar in nature to an app before. As for the content, using YouTube’s API was a “no-brainer” due to its ease of use as well as the quality (and, undoubtedly, quantity) of the site’s videos.
While Soundslice was born of one guitarist’s frustrations, Holovaty has his eye on other instruments as well. “Just today we added support for bass, mandolin, banjo, ukulele and any other instrument that has 4, 5 or 7 strings,” he says. At the moment, Soundslice is free, but Holovaty plans to add a paid Pro account option as well as license the technology to music ed sites to generate revenue.
Interestingly, Holovaty doesn’t see social as the only key to Soundslice’s future success, despite the atmosphere of collaborative learning built into the application. “[The community of users is necessary] some extent, but not the full extent. I wanted to make it super useful just on its own, even without the social aspect.”
To learn more about Soundslice, visit their website and follow them on Twitter at @soundslice.
