The Need: An app that will help musicians learn their favorite songs

Johnny Quattro is a visionary musician who wanted to create apps to help his fellow musicians who often struggle trying to find the right chords for songs they want to play.. For our first collaboration, he reached out to Oursky with a paper prototype and an idea. Over the course of three years, we prototyped and developed multiple Jamn products for millions of musicians across the world.

Building on the success of the award-winning Jamn MULTI-TOOL, Johnny Quattro engaged Oursky again to develop Jamn PLAYER. Johnny wanted an app that was more than iTunes or Spotify — he envisioned it to be the best music player for musicians to learn their favorite songs.

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Oursky’s Strategy: Create an intuitive mobile UI powered by a custom algorithm

Oursky worked with Johnny Quattro to develop his product iteratively using human-centred design. Our designers reimagined how musical scores would look on a dynamic mobile screen. We tested and refined the iOS Jamn PLAYER to give musicians a seamless experience between discovering and listening to songs on iTunes, and playing them along.

Oursky built a custom dataset and algorithm for the app's tuner using Matlab, Haskell, and Python. The app integrates with a user's iTunes library and analyzes a selected song to show the chords to a user. We designed our entire backend app logic based around user experience. We kept the app lightweight by sending a song’s source file as a small, pitch record (as a JSON file) to a server, which is then processed in order to generate the guitar keys. We also ensured that the app is light on mobile data usage by doing local file conversions on the user’s phone.

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The Result: An award-winning music app

For this app, the key to user experience went beyond a refined and intuitive UI. With innovative work from Oursky’s designers, Jamn PLAYER is able to create accurate chords of the latest music available on iTunes. This innovation was not seen unnoticed: After we launched Jamn PLAYER, it was featured globally on Apple's App Store and was chosen as an Editors' Choice and Best New Music App. The app garnered 700,000 downloads within six months of launch. Read our blog post to learn more about our journey with Jamn!