Credits
A tool is never born alone. Here are the people who, closely or from a distance, had a hand in making it.
Family
It all starts there. Julien — my brother, Piza — whose musical ear and sense of theory are in every measure of this tool. My father, who put guitars in our hands before we knew what to do with them. My mother, who has since picked up guitar and bass herself — because once music gets into a house, it never really leaves.
The band
The people it all really started with — the first rehearsals in garages and at the youth club, the first gigs, the first riffs learned together. Alviena exists a little bit for them, and because of them.
The accomplices
A brilliant guitarist and a man of vision. Greg was one of the first to understand what this tool could become, to help shape it with me, and to ask the right questions at the right time. The kind of outside perspective that changes everything.
A guitarist and a developer — the dream combination for this project. Bastien understands both sides of it: what a musician expects from a tool, and how to build it properly. His help means a lot.
What comes from elsewhere
The app would run without them, but it would not look or sound the same: no artwork, no previews, a piano made of oscillators and a tempo to type in by hand.
- Apple Music — album artwork, thirty-second previews, release year and genre, through the iTunes Search API.
- Deezer — song tempo, queried first because it is freely available and has no quota.
- GetSongBPM — tempo where Deezer has none. The key itself is worked out from the chords you write.
- smplr — the sampled instruments heard during playback: a concert piano, and General MIDI sounds for the stringed instruments.
- LinnDrum LM-2 — the drum machine kit uses the sounds of this 1982 drum machine.
And to everyone who uses Alviena, shares their chord sheets, and sends feedback — thank you. You're the best reason to keep going.