dots

Overview

This is what my desk looks like during an average writing session. Although my phone is missing as it's taking the photo, my desk often features Voice notes opened on my phone for quick audio recordings, my monitor with FL Studio paired with my MIDI keyboard to jot down quick chords and keys ideas. My smaller laptop screen has Google keep notes for lyric ideas and Rhymezone on split screen.

dots is the solution for the songwriters cluttered desk: an all-in-one songwriting web app. It's an infinite musical idea board that combines composition, note-taking, and media tools in one persistent creative workspace.

On an infinite interactive canvas, users can place multifunction sticky notes—rich text, audio/video recordings with transcription, virtual instruments (keyboard and drums), metronome, and a tuner.

The system is built in Next.js with light Tailwind and MUI styling.

User Pain Points

Here are some pain points I compiled from interviews. I interviewed both professional and hobbyist songwriters and producers.

Ideas stored in different mediums

My song ideas ideas are scattered across many apps, which makes capturing and organizing thoughts frustrating. I have audio notes stored in my voice notes app on my phone, lyric ideas on Google Keep, harmony and chords in my DAW, and video recordings for guitar parts elsewhere. Note that these are the tools I use just during the ideation of the song, not making it.

Too many files

A 2017 viral video from Rolling Stone features Charlie Puth showcasing his songwriting process. In the video, Puth scrolls through various song ideas before clicking on one and saying, “I wonder if this is the track.”

Obviously, I’m not nearly as successful a songwriter as Charlie Puth, but I empathize with that experience. Across all the different software and apps I use to capture ideas, I’ve accumulated hundreds—maybe even thousands—of fragments: three-word lyric lines, two-second audio clips, four-bar drum loops. Half of them don’t even have names. And honestly, naming them often feels like more work than actually creating them.

Non-linear workflow

Here’s an example of one of my Google Keep notes. The blank lines are irregular, random words are thrown in, and some lines repeat when they definitely weren’t meant to. It’s a mess. But somehow, that mess is what works best for me. There are always so many ideas you want to use but can’t quite fit into the lyrics, so you don’t delete them—they just sit there, which can be both useful and frustrating.

Songwriting is rarely a linear process. You don’t simply move top-to-bottom as if you’re writing a quick email. It’s non-linear: you might jump back to the first line, skip ahead to the second pre-chorus, then circle back to the first verse. Traditional text editors aren’t well-suited for this kind of workflow, because songwriting is about connecting scattered dots rather than writing in a straight line.

Solutions

White board interface

A whiteboard-style interface for songwriting is like a digital creative playground. Instead of being trapped in a rigid document or folder system, you have an open canvas where any type of idea—lyrics, chord progressions, audio snippets, videos, or references—can be placed anywhere. Each idea appears as a movable sticky note or card, so you can freely rearrange them to group related concepts, map out song sections, or experiment with structure. AI-powered transcription turns audio notes into readable text instantly, removing the need to click into files or press play just to remember what they are. This mirrors how many musicians naturally brainstorm—scattering ideas, shifting them around, and discovering relationships visually. In the end, it’s all about connecting the dots, and a whiteboard makes those dots easier to see.

Swiss Knife—but not too much

A compact yet versatile all-in-one songwriting toolkit, built to help musicians capture ideas quickly and intuitively without getting bogged down in complex production workflows. Every tool is represented with familiar, musician-friendly icons, ensuring instant recognition and ease of use. The focus is on streamlining the creative process—providing just the right set of essentials to move ideas from mind to page (or screen) without friction.

1. Metronome with tempo tapper – determine and lock in the song’s BPM

2. Drum machine – create and experiment with basic beat patterns

3. Keyboard – play and record simple melodic or harmonic parts

4. Tuner – keep instruments perfectly in tune before recording

Cloud-Based, accessible anywhere

A cloud-based songwriting app keeps every idea—lyrics, audio, video, and sketches—instantly accessible from any device. No more juggling phones, laptops, or tablets, and no more tedious Airdrops, emails, or messaging files to yourself. This dramatically reduces downtime and preserves creative flow. Need to bring an idea into your DAW? Simply open the web app, find the file in seconds, download it, and drag it straight into Ableton, Logic, FL Studio, or any other software. Previously, moving ideas was a creative buzzkill: scrolling through hundreds of voice notes, sending them via email or KakaoTalk, converting formats from M4A to MP3, and losing motivation before even starting. Now, it’s a seamless zoom out, click, and drop—ready to work in seconds.

Takeaways

Although relying on mental models can often be important in UX design, it can also be helpful to not rely on the traditional, more expected, interfaces for a certain cases. All music creation software have the same horizontal linear structure similar to a video editing tool. Although this works for more detailed work when trying to capture an entire song in a linear fashion, going for a completely new outlook has proven to be useful in the case of dots.

dots reduces cognitive load by consolidating scattered files, voice notes, and text snippets into a single visual system of movable cards, allowing songwriters to focus on creativity rather than organization. To support the way songwriters naturally work—jumping between fragments and sections—it offers a flexible whiteboard-style canvas instead of a rigid, linear structure. This approach is complemented by an intentionally compact toolkit that provides just enough versatility to capture lyrics, chords, beats, and riffs without overwhelming users or disrupting creative flow.