KeyBuddies | Devpost

Why did we make KeyBuddies?

Everybody wants to be a music producer, but there's still massive barrier to entry. Lack of school funding for the arts, and expensive, professional suite software only serve to lock latent talent out of the game. My experience starting as a music producer six years ago was the same; if my motivation had waned even a little, there's a good chance I'd have nothing to do with music today. So I pitched to my team the idea of something as easy to use as Kahoot, as intuitive to use as GarageBand, and as collaborative as shooting the sh*t around a lunch table, and after some convincing, we started working on KeyBuddies.

What's it like to use KeyBuddies?

KeyBuddies is a lightweight, barebones DAW (what GarageBand is) that runs seamlessly on your browser. You start by creating a collaborative studio or joining one with a code, just like Kahoot, and after sharing around the invite your friends will soon pile in. At that point, you can start creating your track. You can program in your music with our intuitive dropdown composition system, designed to teach children relative pitch, or use our preloaded loops to give the song structure. Have your friends jump in too thanks to our real time collaboration. When you're done, just hit play. It's going to be awesome. We promise.

How did we pull it off?

Great question. This is the boring part so we'll run through it quickly. We used Next.js for our core functionality, Tailwind CSS for frontend, Firebase to handle file storage, Logic Pro to create sounds and loops, and Photoshop to design our UI/UX. If you're interested in learning more, reach out to any of us on LinkedIn: Soorya, Atharv, Mithil, or Anav.

Challenges, accomplishments, what we learned

Duuuuuuuuuude. We barely had any time wtf. My teammates are used to day-long hackathons but it was rough for me. Our final project is certainly a bit of a rush job, had to bodge the music together, but we're planning on cleaning it up and implementing all of the features we wanted in the coming days. We're maybe, 80% of the way done as of writing this post? Check out what we have so far though and join with the code 441762 for some Taylor Swift.

What's next for us?

This was hella fun as usual. We hope to keep hitting up more hackathons. Not much else to say, we're going to keep grinding hackathons so follow us to stay in the loop. We'd be happy to see you at our next event. Also – before I forget, I'm launching an overnight hackathon but for music this April. I'd love to give you the whole pitch if you'd be interested in potentially contributing to the event fiscally, so please reach out to me on LinkedIn. Take it easy!