Hum, An iPhone App for the Mobile Songwriter

As a songwriter, inspiration often strikes at the least opportune times. It’s easy to envision a musician scrambling for a pen and a pad, repeating a lyric and melody before the miraculous musical idea fades as quickly as it appeared. The advent of mobile technology seemed to somewhat streamline the songwriting process with digital note pads and dictaphones on command, making it relatively easy to jot down and record ideas on the go. But every technological invention has its limitations, and since Apple isn’t catering to the “mobile songwriting” niche, Notes and Voice Recorder offer no real method of in-app and inter-app integration and organization.

Aaron Shekey and Joseph Kuefler have created a much an easier way for songwriters to keep track of their ideas. With their new app Hum, lyrics and recorded melodies are combined in a single app, a surprisingly simple feat that few other apps have tackled. In a minimal and navigable interface with few frills, Hum offers a unique and highly efficient option for quick songwriting, plus easy sharing opportunities to collaborate with fellow musicians. Though the app is still in its nascent stage, Hum’s flexibility and straightforwardness open possibilities for expansion and growth in the near future, possibly revolutionizing the way we write songs on our phones.

Hum sports a cool green and white screen, with a light font that’s easy to read. Opening the app will take you directly to your list of songs, and a variety of sort options from the drop-down menu will help you navigate your notebook. You can filter your songs by date, note type (lyrics or audio, or both), key, guitar tuning (of which there are many, many listed), capo position, and mood. There are also two sliders which denote mood and timbre or energy. Within each note, the filters can beadjusted to organize each song accordingly. Recording your voice is pretty straightforward — press the big record button and play back from within the note or from the quick player in list view.

We had a chance to catch up with Aaron Shekey, one of the Hum founders, to talk briefly about the app and its plans for the future.

1. Where is the Hum team from, and what are your backgrounds?

Hum began and continues to be driven out of Minneapolis, MN, one of the country’s greatest music cities. Aaron cut his teeth designing websites for big brands. He later moved to San Francisco to work for Adobe. There he conceived of, designed and helped to build Edge Reflow, the first responsive web design application. Joseph spent years working as Creative Lead at Zeus Jones, a modern brand agency. While there, he led creative and strategic efforts for brands like Google, Purina and General Mills.

2. What sort of songwriting experiences informed the creation of Hum?

Hum began as way to scratch our own itches. We were sick of using the iPhone’s native VoiceMemos app to collect our ideas. We were tired of our lyrics sitting next to shopping lists and reminders.

3. You have filters for key and capo, is Hum made especially for acoustic singer-songwriters?

No. We want Hum to appeal to as many genres and types of musical creators as possible. We’ve got metal guitarists, rappers, songwriters, jazz musicians and many other types of artists using Hum today. We’ll continue to polish Hum’s features to enable artists of all shapes create and organize more efficiently.

4. Do you think you may integrate other sounds and/or instruments (like a mobile keyboard or drum sequencer) in the future to record melodies and rhythms on the fly?

We’re going to continue to introduce features that help artists capture ideas, but we have no plans to turn Hum into a full-featured digital audio workstation. Hum is much less about performance, and much more about capturing ideas. A melody can just as quickly be captured by singing into Hum as it could from a tiny iOS keyboard.

5. Hum’s interface is pleasantly minimal — are there limitations you’re imposing on the design and functionality to keep it simple?

We’re constantly challenging ourselves to maintain a simple and elegant interface. This requires us to question everything and include only what we need.

Beyond that, the App Store is filled with thousands of apps packed with dozens of features each. This is especially true within the music category. There is no shortage of complex music production/editing apps out there. What musicians were missing was a simple tool focused solely on the initial spark of an idea, a tool that was tailor-made for capturing and organizing their ideas, a tool with as few steps between idea and finished recording as possible. In some ways, this makes it easy to keep Hum’s interface simple. Musicians don’t need another full-feature Garageband, so we get to forego many of the complexities there.

We don’t add features unless we can do it in a dead-simple manner.

6. Do you have any plans to build collaborative communities around Hum?

Absolutely. Without going into too much detail, I’ll leave it at “absolutely!”

7. What kind of syncing does Hum offer to back up songs?

Hum doesn’t sync just yet. We had to start somewhere and wanted to get Hum in people’s hands as soon as possible. We have a working version of Dropbox syncing that we’re testing right now. It’ll be a minute before it’s released though, securing our user’s ideas and in-progress work is incredibly important—building the best damn songwriting app out there requires us to do whatever we can to ensure our users never lose an idea.

8. Do you plan on partnering with any other platforms to expand the reach and functionality of the app (i.e. Audiobus, SoundCloud, etc.)?

We’re always considering new and exciting ways to modernize songwriting. We haven’t established partnerships yet. As soon as a few critical feature additions are complete, we’ll more actively connect with like-minded apps and companies.

9. Any big names that have endorsed Hum?

While we haven’t yet established official endorsees, we do have a great list of influential users: members of Sugarland, Punch Brothers and OK Go; Jeremy Messersmith; Justin Lowe (After the Burial); Ben Kweller; members of Doomtree; Paul Baloche (one of Christian music’s biggest names). As important as the bigger names are, there are thousands of unknown songwriters from around the globe using Hum today.

Hum is available for download on the iTunes App store, and you can keep up with Hum’s progress on Twitter and on their blog.