A short backstory

In my weeks behind the piano, preparing songs and teaching harmony parts to people with varying levels of musical experience, I began to need a way to keep everything in my head… the chord changes, the lyrics, the arrangements.

When we performed live for the first time, I loaded up my iPad with PowerPoint videos that showed the lyrics and chord changes. They also served as our backing tracks.

When we moved into our new home — a disused and repurposed public swimming baths in Stirchley, Birmingham — the backing tracks powered our sessions, but putting the videos together was time-consuming and laborious.

Enter Praecentor (pry•sen•ter)

I was going through an ancient Greek phase so I looked up an old Greek word for “conductor” (or thereabouts). I then set to work on a tool that could help me make lyric and chord videos from a simple text file.

Now all I had to do was create a text file with lyrics, chords, and a few settings, and Praecentor would churn out videos that not only reminded me what to play, but kept me on the beat.

As well as making backing tracks, I’d also record all the vocal parts and embed a cute little player in the members-only area of the singing group’s website. This helped singers learn and practice their parts, letting them toggle different vocal parts on and off as needed.

I’ve been developing Praecentor with the help of CoPilot for about six months, and the code to make videos is fully open source and available online.

The final missing piece

Now the only issues I had were organising and syncing my videos, navigating Dropbox’s constantly changing user interface, switching between different apps and websites when running sessions, and quickly getting to a song when someone requested it.

So I got to work building Maestro, a tool for making play-along videos, teaching parts, sharing tracks with members, and storing everything offline so you don’t have to rely on wifi.