During the rainy Amsterdam winter of 2018, I was spending a lot of my evenings with my friends playing guitar and singing. I have quite a low voice and often struggle to sing moderns songs which are mostly written for tenors. In that kind of situation transposition normally helps.

Technically, transposing chords for guitar is a pretty straight forward process. You just have to put the capodaster on the proper fret, and voila! The issue is that finding the proper key normally takes some time. Especially if you haven’t tried to sing the song before.

So this is how the process would normally go for me: My friends would ask me to play another recent masterpiece. I would google some chords and start identifying my key. In the meantime, the audience would be waiting for me and yawning.

The process of finding that key was frustrating almost every time. I have an engineering degree and more than 10 years of work experience in the IT industry. As you might imagine I have a tendency to automate things. So at some point, while struggling to figure out where to put my capo, I thought: “It would be great if there was a service for this”.

I tried to search for one on the internet but I didn’t find any. So I decided to create one.

The problem looked fairly simple. I know what my vocal range is. If I know the range of the song I want to sing, then I can make the computer tell me how much to shift the notes! Eurica! I started collecting a database of vocal ranges for songs.

While I was busy preparing the database I talked with some musicians that I knew personally to check if they had any similar problems to mine and if they were looking for solutions. Here is where community power showed itself. People started giving me suggestions on what other features might be useful to add to my service after I prepared my database.

Some people wanted to know which songs they could comfortably sing in karaoke, some were looking for challenges, some for a part in a musical. One of the vocal teachers I talked to was struggling to put together repertoires for her students based on their musical genre preferences and singing capacities. There was one common thing in all of these requests. People wanted to find songs to sing based on their vocal range. And that’s what I’ve built.

Singing Carrots, a website that connects a singer with a song

The website started with two main features. Both features first required a user to enter their vocal range. After that users can either explore songs based on the song genre and difficulty; or they can find any particular song through the text search and check in which key it would be optimal for them to sing the song.

On top of that, I started trying to add more features that could come in handy along the way. First I added links to youtube videos, lyrics, and music sheets, then the interactive vocal range test, then the artist ranges, and so on. Since then I'm adding more things and features as people are actively using the service.

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