I am a songwriter/musician. I tried writing songs on an iPhone, but I found it difficult to navigate the traditional DAW timelines on my phone. So I built Demo Tapes, where songs are written in sections (intro, verse chorus...) instead of timelines
I collaborated with session musicians around the world to record hundreds of loops to begin a song (guitars, drums, bass, synth, piano, vocal hooks, organs). There's no AI, these are all recorded by real musicians. Meet my session musicians here: https://demotapes.app/#band
In Demo Tapes, you start by writing sections, then you can copy, paste, rearrange them as you like. That's how I create as a songwriter.
The loops are "smart", so anytime you drop in a loop, it's key and tempo matched. Loops are also aware of chord progressions. So usually, when you add a loop, the "recommended" loops will match the chord progressions of that section. Not perfect, but works most of the time
Easy sharing: When you finish a song, you can create an audio file which can be uploaded to Demo Tapes server, and you get a URL that you can share with anyone. They don't need to download the app.
App is free and no sign up required
I am a musician, not a developer, so it took me many years to get here. My entire goal is to make songwriting easy for anyone. So anyone can write a song, even if they have never tried.
I would really appreciate some feedback.
Hello Product Hunt
I’m Mahim, a musician and engineer, and the maker of Demo Tapes.
I built Demo Tapes because I felt mobile music apps were either too complicated or not real enough. I wanted something simple where you could capture a song idea quickly and end up with something that sounds like a real song. "Must haves" for me were (1) real loops from actual musicians (no AI). Not trying to disparage AI music, I just prefer the sound of raw musicians. And (2) Ease of building a song, without diving into menus and timelines etc.
Instead of a traditional DAW timeline, Demo Tapes builds songs with sections like intro, verse, and chorus, which is how I write songs.
I also collaborated with session musicians around the world to record the instruments and vocals, so the library is made from real performances. The app matches loops intelligently so everything stays in key and in time while you experiment. You can check out all the musicians on the Demo Tapes website.
App is free and no sign-up required.
It took about four years of building and rebuilding to get here.
I’d love to hear what you think and what kinds of songs you make with it.
For the songwriters here, what is the biggest pain point when trying to write a song on a mobile device? For me, it was just the effort of getting everything setup, and in the time it took to get setup, the moment was gone!!
Happy to answer any questions!
— Mahim