Beta
Beta
Sessionist is a community app for Irish traditional music tunes. You play, it listens. Real music guide tracks contributed and owned by users. Rate tune versions. Make friends. Share tunes.
BetaSessionist is in open beta — news, updates and the live bug list→
Version 0.91.6
Couldn’t load the latest version — visit sessionist.ie to download.
It can listen to you playing any tune (on a monophonic instrument) and can score your performance. It gives you a reason if you miss any note. If you want to opt in to social (over 16s only) you can make friends, see what they are practicing, see them in leaderboards, swap performances and playlists.
In terms of future features, some that are close to being ready are ornament scoring, polyphonic instruments, backing track recording, recording multipart new versions. A lot of these depend on where users want the attention to go on the app.
When you play well enough, you can contribute your recordings as guides for others to learn from. You own that content and can delete it as you wish. The same applies to all your contributed content like tune image art, playlists, shares of your performances. Everything stays yours and only yours.
It's ready and you can test it. But for testing of pre-release apps Apple need testers to install an extra Apple app called 'TestFlight'. Look it up and if you're happy to do that, send me a message and I'll set you up.
Since it is serving real audio files there has to be some limit on the 'free' part. I haven't enough information about how much it costs to run a busy audio file serving cloud app to say yet. I can say it won't be a subscription, it will be a one off purchase. And I can say that right now I'm planning for the 'paid' version to be €2.99 but that this is a guess.
But casual users won't be forced to buy this 'paid' version. There will always be a completely free way to use Sessionist for everyone up to a daily limit on the internet based aspects of usage (downloads, uploads etc). I'm happy to be quite open about the number of users and the costs so that interested users can see the real finances of the app.
Learn is a 'Listen and Repeat' mode with no timing pressure. Take as many goes as you need. Get the muscle memory in for each phrase, until you can produce them without thinking.
Practice mode is when you play the tune in time along with the contributed real audio from other instruments. If you can hit all the notes at 100% speed the tune is added to your repertoire.
The goal is to make users session-ready. That means they are able to join a real world Irish music session without being a drag on the generosity or the patience of the other musicians. It's a goal that users will help define in better detail as we go. But we know that it must involve knowing enough tunes.
The starter tunes. You know them already in your head. Now let your fingers learn them. This is the way.
A minimum viable repertoire — enough to participate here and there in a friendly open session.
Comfortable at any session. You’ve earned the title: Sessionist.
Everyone plays the same melody in their instrument's best octave. You just enable the instruments you want to learn and Sessionist will handle the rest.
