Welcome To The TuneLings Project!

A TuneLing is a digital product, made by a musician, and sold online.

It’s a file containing detailed musical information about a particular recording (i.e. a song), but it’s completely separate from that recording. To use or create TuneLings, you need the TuneLings Application (currently available for MacOS, from this site). It plays the song, using its matching TuneLing to create a perfectly synchronized, animated play-along display, which teaches how to play it. Currently, TuneLings support any type of stringed instrument, like guitar, ukulele, bass guitar (and all others), and can address learning needs at all skill levels, from beginners to pros.

As a learning tool, a TuneLing is uniquely powerful. Our feature set is innovative, and always growing; TuneLings can do a lot now, but our roadmap for future capabilities is kinda mind-blowing.

But that’s not our most important distinction.

What really sets us apart is our business philosophy. The Internet has made most of the world’s recorded music accessible to everyone, at little or no cost. But that has devastated the livelihoods of artists, and there’s no turning back – so musicians need new ways to earn income.

The TuneLings platform is fighting back in a constructive way, by creating an entirely new product, worth paying a modest price for. And importantly, TuneLings are crowd-sourced – they can be made by anyone with musical skill, and can be sold with or without the recording they’re based on. Whoever makes the TuneLing, gets paid when it sells.

In short: everything – it’s all you need, whether you’re a learner, artist, or teacher. It’s a powerful audio player, with features like independent speed and pitch controls, looping and much more. It plays TuneLings, perfectly synced to audio, providing a customizable animated visual display. It houses the TuneLings Store, where learners can get new TuneLings. It contains all the “authoring” functionality need to make TuneLings, and publish them for sale. You can get it from the Download page on this site, for free, now.

Bonus: the app’s advanced playback controls work for any audio file, even without a matching TuneLing. That alone makes the TuneLings application a valuable tool for any musician, on any instrument, and it’s free.

We informally call TuneLings a “platform”, because it’s a set of technologies that allow anyone to create, sell, buy and use TuneLings. TuneLings can differ wildly in style and content – so there’s a big opportunity for authors to be creative – and to be recognized and rewarded for that. “TuneLings” is a platform, because other things are built on top of it, and the richness of those things can grow over time.

“The TuneLings Project” is a very specific way of introducing TuneLings to the world, incorporating our public “Beta” software release. The Project focuses on selling TuneLings, bundled with high-quality music downloads, from respected independent artists and labels. The audio files will be playable on any device, and will be sold along with their TuneLings for a single price (which is set by the artist). There will also be free TuneLings available for major-label artists’ music (without free audio files), but more on this later.

One goal of the Project is to test our Beta software, web services, and commerce infrastructure. But the more important goal is to create “mindshare”. We need artists and their fans – especially the learners amongst them, to try TuneLings, and help us make it the best that it can be. We think you’ll agree that not only is this a fun, effective way to learn how to play, but it’s also an entirely new way for musicians to earn income, and interact with their fans – and it benefits us all.