Tantacrul’s next music company is Notefinder

After moving on from Audacity and MuseScore earlier this year, Tantacrul (Martin Keary) has launched Notefinder alongside a collective of co-founders. Notefinder is a new service that aims to “advance sheet music and notation technology”. This is a great idea because digital sheet music has historically been published in PDF, which creates all kinds of accessibility issues. Editing digital scores has never been an easy task either, requiring wrestling with awkward tools.

Notefinder is a subscription service that, in time, will replace PDFs with a new document type that provides arrangement sheet music for different instruments. For now, PDFs are the standard, and they often come as a PVG (piano, vocal, and guitar) set. There are other arrangements that contain different instruments, such as bass guitar or wind instruments. I’ve already found some Kate Bush songs that have multiple arrangements for the same song! The team working on the service have been hired because of their musical composition and arrangement experience to create professional arrangements. The arrangement is then licensed so the right artist gets the royalties they earn. I really like the concept, and it scratches my old MIDI brains because I used to scour websites for MIDI files of game music and certain songs to learn how to play them.

I’m a Lead Content Designer in my day job, and I was impressed to find an extensive metadata section for each arrangement. There are user and site-rated difficulty levels, key, tempo, time signature, vocal range, and even music grading levels attached, alongside other licensing details. I’d like to see arranger credits added, so the team doing the arrangements gets their name in lights. It’s one of the most extensive metadata schemas I’ve seen since Imogen Heap’s Auracles.

I’m intrigued to see where this all goes. Tantacrul has released a “making of” video that goes into lots of detail about how Notefinder was formed. I wish the service all the best and may well dabble myself when more artists I personally adore are added in the future.

Explore Notefinder. There is also an iPhone app version, too, which is the only way to download something for offline use. An Android app is on the way.

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