Welcome to ChartBlazer

Welcome and thanks for being here. If you are reading this you want to learn songs quicker, play more confidently on stage, or just be a better drummer in general. These are some of the reasons to chart out songs. Even if you don't read off a chart on stage, charting a song makes sense of it. You are learning or remembering sections instead of individual bars: an eight-bar verse and the cue that gets you out of it, rather than a page of notation to sight-read while the band is already playing.

Starting out

I started drumming around 15 years ago, playing with my friends in a garage band (yes, in a garage). Starting out I didn't really know about charting, and we were doing mainly covers (some cringy videos here), I was more into transcribing, which I found quite difficult (both in figuring out the parts and in finding software I was comfortable with). I wound up using a now defunct program, TabTrax, for a while. I found this easiest of the bunch to enter and playback drum notation. This was a version of the music staff paradigm, just drum focused with a bit easier editing than the big notation applications.

Charting for church

I've been formally charting for the last five years as the drummer for Gulf Coast Church in Bradenton, Florida. When I started, having never performed live, I was just trying to figure out what I was doing, and I came across a book called How to Write a Fast & Easy Drum Chart. That introduced me to charting and how it differs from the type of transcription I was trying to do. I started using the software mentioned in the book, Drum Chart Builder.

From paper to a tablet

For most of my church drumming time, I used Drum Chart Builder and printed the pdfs, using a looseleaf binder in rehearsal and on stage. Only recently, getting tired of the reams of paper I was wasting, I decided to try to view the PDFs on my tablet. Having tried a few different apps, I eventually settled on Xodo. I could set up all my charts in tabs and mark up the charts with a stylus.

The Xodo workflow was a real step up from paper charts for me, and it inspired me to take it a step further and build my own chart app. I wanted to combine the best of Xodo with the best of Drum Chart Builder, and add features neither had.

Why I built ChartBlazer

I started ChartBlazer as a personal project to build charting software exactly how I wanted it. Using some of the new AI assisted coding tools, the project progressed quicker and better than I could imagine (and this comes from a software engineer of 20 years) and it became something I decided to make public. I've always thought about a community chart feature (think Songsterr), and now I've been able to build one. You can clone and comment on other drummers' charts.

Thanks again for being here and reading this. In upcoming blog entries, I'll highlight some important tips and tricks, things in ChartBlazer that I find valuable, but are easy to overlook. I invite you all to send in any feedback or suggestions, and I will do my best to implement them.

If you want to see what one of these charts actually looks like, you can open one and play with it without an account.

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