gearhunt

Find the right sound for covering a song

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Inspiration

If you ever played in a cover band, you know this: It's pretty hard to find out how to get the "right" sound for your songs. It took me literally hours and a lot of internet research / repeatedly listening to YouTube videos to setup my synth and guitar gear. Why isn't there a platform that makes this easier, by crowdsourcing this tedious task so you can focus on making music instead of analysing songs?

The potential user base is huge. For any band at a festival like Les Ardennes there are thousands of amateurs trying to become "just like them". And that's where the money is: Bring the people closer to their desired gear and gear vendors will be excited to partner with you.

What it does

gearhunt is a crowdsourcing platform that allows to search for any song and/or artist and get information about their gear and setup (software as well as hardware). It can be used by live bands just as well as by EDM producers or anyone who requires some kind of hard- or software configuration to get the desired sound.

If a song hasn't been "enriched" by the community yet, gearhunt will show you basic information derived from Musimap and encourages you to enhance the data with VST presets, drum loops, MIDI drum patterns or even knob settings of a traditional guitar amp.

For your convenience, it also allows you to directly buy a certain gear if you don't have it, via partnerships with the software vendors and/or affiliate networks. In this case, gearhunt gets a commission on the sales.

gearhunt is also an interesting social marketing platform for artists, since they can support their community by providing information about their gear setup.

How I built it

The platform is built on MeteorJS and uses the APIs of Musimap, MOD Devices and Spotify. Musimap is used to retrieve basic information about a track. The results are delivered in a suggest search fashion, i.e. you get suggestions as you type. For the time being, we use the MOD API to retrieve all pedal boards available in the MOD community and show one of these boards at random. In the future, it will be possible to link to a specific board that brings you the right sound for your song. Another idea would be to enhance the MOD API so you can explicitly search for songs a pedal board setup is intended for. Spotify is used to allow the user to play the track right from the user interface.

Challenges I ran into

  • We initially started as a 3-person team. But the other two guys had to drop out in the early evening, since one had to get back to Paris for an important meeting on Thursday, and the other one was called by his startup team-mates because they had to prepare something for a pitch on Friday. So I ended up as a one-man show :-)
  • The response time from the remote services is a bit slow, but this is probably due to the network connection here at the Hackathon site. So the suggest search feels a bit "slow". I'm created a cache for repeated searches, so the response will be way quicker for them. Curious how it feels with a low-latency connection.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Integrated 2 partner APIs and a bonus API (Spotify) in a way that really makes sense. Not bad. :-)

What I learned

I never heard about Musimap or MOD, both are quite cool products :-)

What's next for gearhunt

Near time:

  • Integration with the whosampled.com API, so an EDM producer (or bedroom producer) can find the stem that a professional used for a remix.
  • Integrate a commercial sample / stem database or partner with other market players like loopmasters for additional revenue streams.
  • Add community features so users can chat about a specific setup and not just rate it.

Future:

Extend the platform with AI logic so you could alternatively upload an existing track and automatically identify (at least some parts of) the setups for them. Maybe starting with beat detection (not only bpm, but also beat patterns) and later extending into other areas. The vision is to become the "Shazaam for Music Makers".

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