Making And Selling TuneLings

Authoring TuneLings

We call the process of creating TuneLings “Authoring”. The TuneLings application has authoring and publishing capability built right in.

TuneLings you make are sold at your chosen price – via the TuneLings Store (also built into the TuneLings application), and you’ll be paid a large portion of the retail price.

Making a TuneLing is not difficult for a moderately skilled musician. As with any powerful tool, there’s a logical workflow, and once you’ve made a couple of them, you’ll pick up speed fast. We expect an author to be able to make a good, basic TuneLing for most songs in under an hour. Adding additional features (multiple instruments, alternate Views, additional instructional details, etc.) will take a little more time, but they’ll make your TuneLing more valuable to learners.

We’ll provide authoring instruction, and all the support we can manage, to get you started.

The Method

Making aTuneLing is a logical step-by-step process. The basic steps include:

• Select a recording
• Prepare lyrics (if applicable)
• Create channels to hold synchronized data (this is semi-automated)
• Establish the rhythmic framework of the song (bar divisions, time signatures, pickups and count-offs
• Enter data (such as chords) into the channel(s), in order, from the beginning to the end of the song.
• Synchronize the data: play the song, and tap the period key on the keyboard at the time of each item. For example, if there’s a D minor chord at beat 2 of bar 3, you tap the period key for that chord, at beat 2 of bar 3, while listening. You can slow down the speed of audio while doing this, to make it easy to be very precise. The process is forgiving – errors are easily corrected, and very fine details are easily edited. The synchronizing process is the same for all types of data (chords, lyrics, rhythm, etc.).

Use Any Recording

You can author a TuneLing for any recording at all – whether or not you own it, because people who buy TuneLings can legally acquire audio files several ways:

• Buy a TuneLing bundled with the correct audio file
• Own a copy of the correct recording when they purchase its TuneLing
• Purchase the required audio file separately from its TuneLing, using a link that we provide (for iTunes or another legal music service)

Because the end-user will always have a legal copy of the required song, we do not infringe recording copyrights. In fact, we’re proud to add value to legally acquired music, and to drive more sales.

Chord Management

The Chord Manager section of the TuneLings application holds a database of chords, for all instruments. It’s easy to create and store new chords. Chords are grouped into Palettes (analogous to a painter’s palette), making it easy to deal only with the correct chords you need for any given song, while authoring it.

Selling

When your TuneLing is complete, you can submit it to the TuneLings Store with a single command from the Publish menu of the TuneLings Application.

When you’re ready to start making TuneLings, click here to see our online training materials.