TANAGER AUDIOWORKS > Songframe

Tanager Audioworks’ SongFrame software is a songwriting toolkit that provides writers and musicians an intuitive platform to develop songs in a streamlined fashion, and prepare these songs for recording on any digital audio workstation.

LIST PRICE: $149.00
WEBSITE: WWW.TANAGERAUDIOWORKS.COM

Tanager Audioworks’ SongFrame software is a songwriting toolkit that provides writers and musicians an intuitive platform to develop songs in a streamlined fashion, and prepare these songs for recording on any digital audio workstation (DAW). While the pen/paper/guitar combo has always been an effective method for writing songs, SongFrame focuses on the writing process itself, rather than on recording a finished product, so it is not really a DAW. When the song is finished, it can be easily imported into a DAW for further recording and/or refining.

It’s more like a huge arsenal of instruments, chords, song structures, rhymes, lyrics, dictionaries and melodies at your fingertips. One of the first things we looked at was the bank of chords at the top right of the screen. You can select a key for your song and simply drag and drop the chords into the song before hitting play and listening back. On the left side of the screen are what Tanager calls “songbits.” Songbits are basically labels to indicate which part of the song a particular progression belongs to, i.e., intro, verse, chorus, etc. As an example, we quickly created a template for a song by arranging the songbits into an intro, verse, chorus pattern and dragged chords into each songbit creating the basic building blocks for a song. We even used one of the suggested chord progressions for our chorus, and it worked seamlessly. SongFrame has a multitude of suggested progressions from hundreds of songs and it automatically transposes them into the key you have selected for the song. We then added melodies to the verse and chorus respectively. Now, we just have to write lyrics. Good thing Tanager has included rhyming dictionaries and even access to Wikipedia. When finished, you can import the track into ProTools and work off of the SongFrame demo to make an official recording. It even prints out professional lead sheets for the musicians to follow in the recording process. Tanager offers a free demo online, so take it for a test drive.