Melodies in Strum Machine

[Not to be confused with medleys.]

Strum Machine does not support the playback of melodies, although if you simply need a way to remind yourself of how a tune goes, see below for some suggestions.

Having an option to play the melody would certainly be very cool and useful, and it’s something that’s been requested many times. However, there are two big hurdles:

• Unlike chord progressions, melodies are protected under copyright and cannot be reproduced without permission. (This isn’t true for public-domain tunes, but figuring out what is and isn’t legally free of copyright is a huge can of worms.)

• It would be an immense undertaking, both in terms of building the necessary capabilities in the software and getting the actual melodies in the database, and as a more-or-less one-person development team, the resources just aren’t there at the moment. For now, we’re focused on making Strum Machine the best rhythmic backup player possible.

For learning the melody or learning new songs, there are many other resources available online, such as videos, recordings, written music, and/or a music slow-downer app. Once you’ve learned the melody to a song (at least somewhat), use Strum Machine to hone your ability to play it confidently in rhythm. (In our opinion, melody/lead playing is best learned from the playing of real humans anyway.)

If you simply want to save a reminder to yourself for how a tune goes, you can paste in a link to a reference recording (e.g. a YouTube video) into the song’s References, and then you can play it in a pop-up window when you have the song open. Sometimes a quick written note (such as the first few notes of the tune) in the Notepad will do the trick as well. In the future, we hope to add other ways of reminding yourself to the Notepad, such as uploading sheet music or audio recordings, or adding a couple bars of tablature.