just a sloppy jam in open D, someone come play with me it's lonely out here!!
r/clawhammer
maybe someday I'll learn a real song but not today
I built a little web app for old time musicians and would love your feedback : Sally's Garden
Hey everyone,
I've been playing old time for a few years and always found myself digging through YouTube tabs, scattered PDFs and forum threads trying to find different versions of the same tune. So I built something to scratch my own itch and figured I'd share it here before going further.
Sally's Garden is a community database for old time tunes (and Appalachian music more broadly). The idea is simple:
- Search for a tune by name (or alias because we all know Cripple Creek has twelve names)
- Browse different versions contributed by the community, ranked by likes
- Filter by instrument and tuning (Cross-G fiddle, Double-C banjo, DADGAD guitar, etc.)
- Contribute your own version either an audio upload or a YouTube link
- Mark tunes as "I know this one" to build your personal repertoire
- See what tunes you have in common with another musician when you visit their profile
There's also a jam session tool you create an ephemeral session (24h), share a link or QR code, everyone joins and the app calculates in real time which tunes the most people in the circle know. Useful when you show up to a pickup jam and aren't sure what everyone plays.
The app is called Sally's Garden, it's free, no ads, mobile-first (usable with one hand while the other holds a bow).
I'm not trying to replace The Session or any existing resource this is specifically built around the old time repertoire and the jam session culture.
Honest question for this community: does this solve a real problem for you? What's missing? What would make you actually open this on your phone at a festival?
All feedback welcome brutal honesty especially. This is early and I'd rather fix it now than after.
PS: the database is pretty empty right now, that's kind of the point of this post. I'm counting on this community to bring it to life, one tune at a time